Project Profile: The Sawyer Seminar - "Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures" 

About this series: 

Rutgers University – Newark was awarded a grant by the Mellon Foundation to organize a Sawyer Seminar Series titled Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures. The Sawyer Seminar, led by ISGRJ-Newark Campus Director Mayte Green-Mercado, co-organized by Lauren Shallish (Urban Education), and hosted at Rutgers-Newark during the 2024-2025 academic year, explored themes of social justice centering on four critical areas of inquiry: systemic racism, environmental crisis and climate change, disability, human displacement and post-conflict resolution, to illuminate common histories and methodological frameworks that can inform generative responses to past and present social harms. Each area of focus reflected not only the scholarly interests of our faculty but also the institutional commitments of Rutgers University- Newark as an anchor institution, devoting its resources to serve our community.

Read more here. 

Reparative and Restorative Paradigms for Environmental Justice | Rutgers University-Newark, April 23-24, 2025

“We face so many overlapping and intersecting crises that we can’t afford to fix them one at a time. We need integrated solutions, solutions that radically bring down emissions while creating huge numbers of good, unionized jobs and delivering meaningful justice to those who have been most abused and excluded under the current extractive economy.” ― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

The seminar Reparative and Restorative Paradigms for Environmental Justice, held at Rutgers University-Newark in April 2025, examined local and global perspectives on the existential challenges posed by climate change. It considered how reparative and restorative approaches to environmental justice may offer more inclusive opportunities to re-imagine the terms of citizenship and self-government; ones that embed the interconnectedness of humans and their ecology in culture, politics, and laws. Recent conversations about reparations in the United States have drawn on both history and analyses of current economic, social, and political perspectives to propose reparative practices that range from monetary compensation to targeted policies that address racial disparities in wealth, housing discrimination, and education access, among others. At a wider scale, scholars like Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò have offered a constructivist view of reparations that proposes a historically informed project of distributive justice that serves a larger and broader world-making process. The project of reparations, therefore, has a forward-facing orientation that by necessity is anchored in the past.

Meet the Co-Leaders for the Reparative and Restorative Paradigms for Environmental Justice Seminar at Rutgers University-Newark

Gaiutra Bahadur is an Associate Professor of Journalism and English at Rutgers-Newark. She is the author of Coolie Woman, a history of indentured women shortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Prize and Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in nonfiction. She is an essayist, critic, and reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Review, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Guardian, among other publications. Her work has been selected as notable by the editors of Best American Essays 2024, and she has won literary residencies at MacDowell and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy. Born in Guyana and raised there and in New Jersey, she writes about empire, its afterlives, and its new incarnations—a focus that connects the two subjects of her current book project: migrants and rising seas, border-crossers both. 

Brian Murphy is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark and the incoming Fulbright-Mary Ball Washington Chair in History at University College Dublin. In the 2024-25 year, he was in the inaugural class of Steven M. Polan Fellows at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, where he founded the State Constitutions Lab, an interdisciplinary research project and seminar centered on the study of state constitutions. He is currently writing a book about the founding of Paterson, New Jersey, as the first planned manufacturing center in the U.S.

Amir Moosavi is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University-Newark. He holds a PhD in Middle East and Islamic studies from New York University. His research and teaching interests center around Arabic and Persian literatures, with a focus on modern and contemporary fiction. His publications have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Middle East Critique, Alif, and Iran Namag, among other venues. In 2021, he co-edited Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses: Sensory Readings of Persian Literature and Culture (Leiden UP, 2021). During his fellowship year with the ISGRJ, he will complete his book manuscript titled Dust That Never Settled: Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War in Arabic and Persian Literatures and two articles related to a second project on cultural representations of the late Cold War era in the Middle East.