Transformative justice in English universities: exploring the conditions of possibility

The intersection of the viral #MeToo campaign with recent Black Lives Matter protests produced more mainstream discussions of abolitionist approaches to sexual violence, which include transformative justice. In this paper, we explore the implications of these discussions for universities in England, which have had less attention from abolitionists than institutions in the US (see for example Coker, 2016; Boggs et al, 2019; Méndez 2020) and in which there is increasing demand for bureaucratic and punitive regulation (Phipps, 2024). First, we review transformative and restorative justice projects already implemented in universities and discuss their levels of success. Second, our paper asks: what conditions of possibility are necessary for exploring, let alone implementing, transformative justice in English universities? We approach this question from two angles – assessing processes and relationships, and the adversarial procedural frameworks currently employed to tackle sexual violence – and ask how the connections and trust necessary for meaningful accountability (Kaba, 2021) could be built in the university space. We also ask how such work might avoid being co-opted and made non-performative (Ahmed, 2012) in the interests of preserving the status quo. Our analysis is situated in the colonial history of universities and their contemporary financial and political entanglements, and the neoliberalisation of higher education, especially in England and Wales.