Category: Articles
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The Te Whare Tapa Whā Framework for Understanding Wellbeing
In restorative practices, we talk a lot about needs. When harm is caused through a crime, wrongdoing, or conflict in a community, that harm generates needs. One of the central questions of restorative justice is “What is needed to repair the harms and make things right?” We also see behavior as communicating unmet needs. So…
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Building a Restorative University
Increasingly, restorative justice is being used as a response to discipline issues on college campuses with encouraging results. Research by sociologists David Karp and Casey Sacks has shown that compared to the traditional conduct model, restorative practices result in fewer appeals, less serious reoffending, higher participant satisfaction, and improvement in student learning.[1] It is estimated…
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Mock Restorative Justice Conference
My colleague Haley and I recently created a video of a mock restorative justice conference as a tool for our university trainings. If you are interested in getting a taste of what a restorative justice conference looks like, please check it out. A few things to know before watching: This is an abbreviated version of…
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Restorative Justice and Grit
A common theme in current educational discourse is “grit.” Over the last few years, I have noticed a constant stream of news articles, podcasts, TED Talks, and studies looking at the importance of grit and how we can help students develop it. The idea behind grit is that we need to start encouraging students to…
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Three Minute Thesis
I recently entered the Three Minute Thesis competition at Victoria University. The Three Minute Thesis competition challenges postgraduate students to explain their thesis research to a non-specialist audience in just 3 minutes. The goal is to clearly outline your research, engage the audience, and make them want to learn more. I thought it sounded like…
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Crime Survivors Speak
“A survey of US crime victims’ attitudes towards crime and punishment just came out: among the interesting findings is that, by a margin of three to one, victims of crime believe that prison makes people more likely to commit crimes than to rehabilitate them, and that people should be held accountable through mechanisms other than…
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Ritual and Community Building in the NZ Pop-Up Sauna
During the month of July, I spent a great deal of time at the NZ Pop-Up Sauna on the Wellington waterfront. The first day we arrived in Wellington, my partner, Sam, fell in love with the waterfront area. As he began looking for jobs during our first weeks here, he decided he wanted to create…
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Understanding Transformational Space: An Analysis of Restorative Justice Conferences through Religious Studies Theoretical Lenses
An article I wrote titled “Understanding transformational space: an analysis of restorative justice conferences through religious studies theoretical lenses” has been published in the latest issue of Restorative Justice: An International Journal. You can access a copy of the article here. This link will provide free access for the first 50 people. If the link…
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Invisibilia: “Flip the Script”
This episode of the podcast Invisibilia, “Flip the Script,” is well worth a listen. The first two stories are about the power of responding to violence and hostility with love. The first story is about an attempted robbery at a dinner party and the second story is about how a Danish town helped young, frustrated…
Lindsey Pointer, PhD 