“Punishment is a conventional device for the expression of attitudes of resentment and indignation, and of judgments of disapproval and reprobation, either on the part of the punishing authority himself or of those “in whose name” the punishment is inflicted. Punishment, in short, has a symbolic significance largely missing from other kinds of penalties” (Feinburg 1965). In debating the justice of punishment, “we think it relevant to ask whether someone did something so that he deserved to be punished, deserved to have a lower share. Most will agree to the relevance of further information with regard to punishments and penalties” (Nozick 733). Next, we consider the proportionality of the punishment to the crime; does the punishment adequately fit the crime? In Dante’s Inferno, for instance, sufficient punishment manifests through Thomas Aquinas’s Contrappasso—a direct reflection or inversion of the sin committed, otherwise known as “counter suffering.” Sinners live out their eternal punishments in a designated circle of Hell, specific to the earthly choices that warranted the damnation. Severity of the sin determines placement in either Upper Hell or Lower Hell, and the type of sin decides the circle (1-9); within circles appointing more egregious sinners, there are concentric rings, depending on the recipient of the violence, fraud, or treachery. Hypocrites find themselves in the sixth concentric ditch of circle 8, where they endure the crushing weight of gilded leaden cloaks, whose donning projects a stately, noble appearance, materializing their false piety and masked corruption (Alighieri 23.64-72). Ironically, retributive justice has a historical past with hypocrisy, as oftentimes those overseeing punitive processes were at fault in ways indistinguishable from the offender—most notably, the Allies, particularly the Americans, in their understanding of Allied prosecution of Nazi leaders at Nuremberg as “a precursor to US political and moral leadership on a global scale” (Mamdani 105). Norman Rich reminds us that the US policy of westward expansion, wherein “the white man ruthlessly thrust aside the ‘inferior’ indigenous populations, served as the model for Hitler’s entire conception of Lebensraum” (Mamdani 105). The admiration of America’s “race-state” by Hitler is forever enshrined in his unpublished 1928 sequel to Mein Kampf, in which he surveys US racist immigration restrictions, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and dramatically expanded on in the Immigration Act of 1924, which instituted a “national origins” quota aimed at promoting immigration exclusively from Northern and Western Europe (Mamdani 106). During the International Military Tribunal (IMT), defense lawyers argued that leaders of the countries that had organized the trial were themselves guilty of war crimes with which the Nazi leaders were charged: “Tu quoque,” or “You did it too!” they proclaimed (Marrus 567).

Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. Translated by Michael Palma, 1st edition, W. W. Norton, 2002.

Feinberg, Joel. “THE EXPRESSIVE FUNCTION OF PUNISHMENT.” The Monist, vol. 49, no. 3, 1965, pp. 397–423, https://doi.org/10.2307/27901603.

Mamdani, Mahmood. Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2020, lccn.loc.gov/2020013624.

Marrus, Michael R. “INTERNATIONAL LAW: The Nuremberg Trial: Fifty Years After.” The American Scholar, vol. 66, no. 4, The Phi Beta Kappa Society, 1997, pp. 563–70. www.jstor.org/stable/41212687.

Nozick, Robert. “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.” Princeton University Press eBooks, 2018, pp. 709–17. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv19fvzzk.69.

Sylvia Tamale defines Ubuntu as “an African traditional ideology of justice and fairness based on the philosophies of humanness, communitarianism, solidarity, and interdependence” (Tamale XV). As discussed in No Future without Forgiveness, Desmond Tutu’s third way of amnesty following South African apartheid fulfilled by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is rooted in the restorative justice incited by a Christianized form of Ubuntu, or Botho, in the Sotho languages—a central feature of the African Weltanschauung (Tutu 14). According to Panashe Chigumadzi, as exercised by the TRC, “Ubuntu holds that ukuhlawula (paying reparations for injuries caused to others) is indivisible from ukubuyisa (the restoration of injured relations)” (Chigumadzi 2025). Archbishop Tutu’s application of Ubuntu in forming the TRC, though, did not provide for South Africa’s foundational centuries of racial terror, limiting the period of redress to forty-four years—that is, 1 March 1960, the month of the Sharpeville massacre, to 10 May 1994, the date of Nelson Mandela’s inauguration (Chigumadzi 2025). “African jurisprudence declares: ‘Ityala aliboli’ (A crime does not rot),” meaning that Ubuntu “operates across time and space—a person is a person through those who have come before us, those who come with us, and those who come after us” and therefore transcends a time limit, such as the one established by the TRC, for injured persons to approach the court of law for justice, redress, and reparations, as elucidated by Chigumadzi in “With What Are You Apologizing?” (Chigumadzi 2025). Deborah Hoffmann and Frances Reid’s documentary Long Night’s Journey into Day, covering the TRC’s investigation of injustices perpetrated during South African Apartheid, demonstrates Ubuntu’s facilitation of restorative justice through reconciliation between the offender and the victim or the victim’s family (Reid).

Chigumadzi, Panashe.With What Are You Apologizing? 25 Oct. 2023, africasacountry.com/2023/10/with-what-are-you-apologizing.

Long Night’s Journey Into Day. Directed by Deborah Hoffmann and Frances Reid, Seventh Art Releasing / Iris Films, 2000.

Tamale, Sylvia. Decolonization and Afro-Feminism. Daraja Press, 2020, darajapress.com.

Tutu, Desmond. South Africa: The New Era. 1994.

Cedric Robinson’s “Racial Capitalism” challenges the Marxist interpretation of capitalism as a revolutionary negation of feudalism and instead argues that “capitalism emerged within the feudal order and flowered in the cultural soil of a Western civilization already thoroughly infused with racialism” (Kelley 2015). According to Robinson, neither capitalism nor racism “[broke] from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of ‘racial capitalism’ dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide” (Kelley 2015). Capitalism isn’t racial according to “some conspiracy to divide workers or justify slavery and dispossession” (Kelley 2015). No, capitalism is racial due to racialism’s permeation across Western feudal society. Robinson argues that racial stratification within Europe started with the dispossession and enslavement of the Irish immigrants, Jews, Roma, and Slavs that made up the working class. This racialization was perpetuated by the ideology of Herrenvolk—governance by ethnic majority—in its driving of German colonization of central Europe and Slavic territories and proving the “inevitability and naturalness of the domination of some Europeans by other Europeans” (Kelley 2015).

Kelley, Robin. “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?” Boston 50 Review, 12 Jan. 2017.

Acquisition of property, according to John Locke, originates through someone’s mixing his labor with it, as “the labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his” (Locke 5:27). Or perhaps it is that “laboring on something improves it and makes it more valuable; and anyone is entitled to own a thing whose value he has created” (Nozick 736). A man’s acquisition of property through labor is fair such that it does not “subdue or appropriate all,” ensuring one’s neighbor “would still have room for as good and as large a possession (after the other had taken out his) as before it was appropriated” (Locke 5:36). This protects against the possibility for someone to “intrench upon the right of another, or acquire to himself a property, to the prejudice of his neighbor” (Locke 5:36). Brennan explains that “until the end of the nineteenth century, freedom and dignity in our country found meaningful protection in the institution of real property. In a society still largely agricultural, a piece of land provided men not just with sustenance but with the means of economic independence, a necessary precondition of political independence and expression. Not surprisingly, property relationships formed the heart of litigation and of legal practice” (Brennan 9). Unfortunately, we “by a tacit and voluntary consent, found out a way how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus gold and silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one” (Locke 5:50). Evidently, the unspoilable monetary value of currency and the power achieved through its collection undermine the system of equal, proportionate ownership set up by Locke. The second limitation to property acquisition makes clear the difference between liberty and license in possessing property; while one has “liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, he has not liberty to destroy himself, or any creature in his possession, [unless] some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it” (Locke 2:6). Additionally, “every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself” (Locke 2:6). Historically, however, as in the case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania, men have exercised property over another person, removing this right. M. NourbeSe Philip, through her epic poem, Zong!, uses the case of Gregson v. Gilbert to demonstrate the estrangement of enslaved peoples as human beings by their proprietors in removing their right to property of their own person.

Brennan, William J. “The Constitution of the United States: Contemporary Ratification.” CQ Press eBooks, 2017, pp. 230–41. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781071800942.n25.

Locke, John. “Second Treatise of Government.” Princeton University Press eBooks, 2018, pp. 213–43. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv19fvzzk.20.

Nozick, Robert. “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.” Princeton University Press eBooks, 2018, pp. 709–17. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv19fvzzk.69.

Philip, M. NourbeSe. Zong!: As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng. Wesleyan UP, 2008.

Aleida Assman defines cultural memory to be “a system of values, artifacts, institutions, and practices that retain the past for the present and the future” (Plenary 11.11.25). The inherently political assertion of cultural memory through “processes of memorialization, museumization, memory tourism and testimony” (Sturken 65) supports the emergence of distinct identities in affiliation to one or various cultural groups and traditions. By providing spaces for memories to be shared, such processes of cultural memory “can allow for engagements with questions of empathy, the valuing of life, and the moral obligations we have to each other in shared humanity” (Sturken 68). Cultural memory became a stage for moral discourse in the 1980s, following the “memory boom,” which involved universal reckoning with devastating events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, “from World War II and the Holocaust to state terrorism throughout Latin America to genocide in Rwanda to 9/11 and global terrorism” (Sturken 63). Cultural memory manifested through memorialization reveals what we, as a society, deem worthy of remembering, whose lives we consider to be grievable, which displays of violence we think to be exceptional, and how our understanding of the three can change over time.

Sturken, Marita. “Cultural Memory in the Wake of Violence.” Chapter Five, 2018, pp. 63–65.

In “A Theory of Justice,” Rawls explains that “in justice as fairness the original position of equality [in which principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance] corresponds to the state of nature in the traditional theory of the social contract” (Rawls 720). As so, Rawls understands fairness to be an agreement on principles of justice by impartial, rational individuals, unknowing of “his place in society,” “his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities,” or “their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities” (Rawls 720), ensuring that no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in the selection of principles by the outcome of chance or reliance on social standing. Similarly, John Locke’s State of Nature—”​​A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties…” (Locke 2:4), constitutes fairness as man’s assumption of equal positions as “servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business” (Locke 2:6). Both Rawls’s original position and Locke’s State of Nature function as hypotheticals to be thought of in defining fairness rather than reproduced, as we will always live in a reality wherein accident of birth, social or economic advantage, and talent will be present. Returning to a time before society, to a State of Nature, in which arbitrary distinctions are not made between individuals by political, social, and economic institutions isn’t an option either. We are then forced to consider whether fairness is even an achievable condition.

Locke, John. “Second Treatise of Government.” Princeton University Press eBooks, 2018, pp. 213–43. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv19fvzzk.20.

Hare, R. M., and John Rawls. “Rawls’ Theory of Justice–I.” The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 91, Apr. 1973, p. 144. https://doi.org/10.2307/2217486.

A term coined by Connor Woodman, the “Imperial Boomerang effect” describes “the way in which empires use their colonies as laboratories for methods of counter-insurgency, social control, and repression, methods which can then be brought back to the imperial metropolis and deployed against the marginalized, subjugated, and subaltern within” (Woodman). Unrestrained by moral reservations or legal restrictions, empires use colonized populations to test out new technologies and introduce forms of social hierarchy, which, once refined, return to the motherland to be implemented against marginalized groups domestically. Considering the Imperial Boomerang effect is especially helpful in grappling with the Holocaust as exceptional to the enlightened traditions of European humanism and democracy or “within a continuum of European history, exceptional only as a particularly extreme manifestation of pre-existing European practice” (Woodman). From the point of view of the global South, who suffered through centuries of European imperialism, the exceptionalism of Nazi Germany lay largely in the fact that for the first time “methods were applied against European populations, within Europe itself” (Woodman). As elaborated on by Aimé Césaire in her Discourse on Colonialism, before Europeans were barbarism’s victims, “they were its accomplices; they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples” (Césaire 36). Also, intertwined with and partly constituted by the importation of European techniques of repression are the historical constructions of race and gender stratification and their use in hierarchical law, which Ernest Renan makes clear in La Reforme intellectuelle et morale: “We aspire not to equality but to domination. The country of a foreign race must become once again a country of serfs, of agricultural laborers, or industrial workers. It is not a question of eliminating the inequalities among men but of widening them and making them into a law” (Césaire 37).

“Cesaire 1950_Discourse on Colonialism 2000 Edition_Humes excerpts.pdf.” Google Docs, drive.google.com/file/d/17zk9eq3hyPZWjJ1sWKhemAtHT3suHlSq/view.

Woodman, Connor. “The Imperial Boomerang: How Colonial Methods of Repression Migrate Back to the Metropolis.” Verso, 9 June 2020, www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4383-the-imperial-boomerang-how-colonial-methods-of-repression-migrate-back-to-the-metropolis.

According to Nwando Achebe, “Igwe bu ike“ directly translates to “The Community is Strength,” an important ideal of Nsukka society, among other African societies, such as the Bantu, who have a similar dictum: “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,“ or “A person is a person because of other persons” (Achebe 198). Igwe bu ike celebrates the freedom of individualism, manifested through akala akaor or akala chi, from restrictions of the community while also recognizing the vitality of community in supporting individualism (Achebe 198-199). A person’s chi, which is completely unique to them, assigns their destiny; strengths and weaknesses, accomplishments and defeats, and good and bad fortunes possessed by a particular individual can be attributed to their chi. A person’s political character is also determined by their chi, initiating one to fulfill certain obligations to their community (Achebe 199). The two limitations to individualism postulated by Chi protect against subordination of others in the community and overindulgence in personal ambition (Achebe 199). The inseparability of the individual from the community and vice versa is especially relevant to the creation of and interaction with forms of memorialization, as discussed by Ying Zhu in relation to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Zhu smartly quotes Maurice Halbwachs in her explanation of the mutual reliance of individual and communal narratives in developing a choreography surrounding the visitation of a memorial: “Individual memory is nevertheless a part or an aspect of group memory, since each impression and each fact, even if it apparently concerns a particular person exclusively, leaves a lasting memory only to the extent that one has thought it over—to the extent that it is connected with the thoughts that come to us from social milieu” (Zhu 328). In other words, individual memories function as smaller units in telling the story of a larger history; however, those individual memories are preserved by the collective retelling and apprehension.

Achebe, Nwando. “King Ahebi Ugbabe Versus the Community.” Men and Masculinities in Modern African History, edited by Stephan F. Miescher and Lisa A. Lindsay, 2003, pp. 52–68.

Zhu, Ying. “Moving Bodies Moving Architecture: Structural Fluidity and Pedestrian Choreographies at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.” Space and Culture, vol. 19, no. 4, journal-article, 2016, pp. 319–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331216643780.

Creative placemaking harnesses the power of arts and culture to revitalize public spaces and advance community wellbeing across areas such as public health, economic development, immigration, and food and agriculture. Like memorialization, these spaces are designed to help residents heal from historic inequities and traumas—but where memorialization looks to the past, creative placemaking looks toward the future, centering justice as both a process and a goal. Rather than commemorating a specific historical event, creative placemaking aims to “remove the cognitive, emotional, and temporal distance between us and the future” and “enact and interact with potential crises as if that future is happening now” (Calderon et al. 2020)—imagining and building toward more equitable communities. This forward-looking, justice-oriented work relies on cross-sector collaboration, bringing together culture-bearing residents, artists, city developers, and architects to help communities recognize, respond to, and recover from shared challenges—creating spaces for cross-cultural interaction and collective reflection on what a just future ought to look like. Although the term “creative placemaking” does not appear explicitly in other course readings, concepts we have covered, including choreography and collective memory, directly inform its practice and its potential as a tool for social justice.

Stuart, Todd. “Creative Placemaking as Cultural Justice.” Humanities 104, 28 April 2026, Davidson College, Hance Auditorium. Plenary.

“Calderon and Takeshita_A Future of Creative Placemaking.Pdf.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gVsYs6jRMhhvza8OrgsHiGQvREXNUfHP/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.

Protest involves more than just our right to freedom of assembly; it is a fundamental tool of justice. Effective protest requires physical intervention “characterized by the interference created by people’s physical bodies” (Foster 2003), as demonstrated in the graphic novel March: Book Two, which narrates the courage of key players in the Civil Rights Movement, and in the documentaries Stop the Church and How to Survive a Plague, both of which showcase the protests of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in the late 1980s. Institutional racism and homophobia demanded new nonviolent forms of protest—distinct from strikes, boycotts, and marches—forms so disruptive they could not be ignored. Figures like Diane Nash and John Lewis built organizations, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), to pursue justice through coordinated action: sit-ins, walk-ins, and pray-ins that supplemented and transformed traditional protest. Even familiar tactics were pushed further in the pursuit of equity. The boycott of segregated bus terminals expanded into the Freedom Riders campaign, while ACT-UP invented the die-in to force public reckoning with the scale and urgency of the AIDS crisis. Conducted on sidewalks and in churches, these actions disrupted commutes and worship alike, demanding acknowledgment from those who might otherwise look away. In each case, the physical position of the body became the instrument of justice itself (Foster 2003).

“Foster-Choreographies of Protest.Pdf.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U5WKfo9vxn0VF3n8GAy1pSFV-I5PsJGV/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.

Lewis, John, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell. March: Book Two. Top Shelf Productions, 2015.

Hilferty, R., Altar Ego Productions, & Frameline. (1992, September 28). Stop the Church (Standard format.) [Video recording].

Frameline. How To Survive A Plague, With Audio Description (2012).[Video/DVD] ROCO Films. Retrieved from https://video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/how-to-survive-a-plague-with-audio-description

Performance can be anything from a ballet rehearsal, to a parade, to your family’s Thanksgiving meal. Performance is the act of existing in the eye of the public—the decisions we make about how to dress, what words to use, and how to carry ourselves in a given situation. These decisions give insight into the deepest cultural values we hold, values that often slip the noose of written knowledge precisely because they live in the body rather than on the page. It is transmitted body to body, not pen to paper—somatic rather than archival, felt rather than stored. What defines performance, ultimately, is its disappearance (Taylor 2003). Like vernacular memorialization, performance escapes the archive. It does not exist within the materialistic structures of contemporary society, which means it cannot be documented or recorded in the same way other cultural forms can. Performance is ephemeral, and has everything to do with memory (Nereson 2022). For this reason, performance escapes replication. A ballet or a meal can never be recreated, because each participant’s unique presence at that point in time is itself a contribution that cannot be replicated. The emotion, solidarity, and imagination of the people that make up a performance will never be distributed in quite the same way—the chemistry is unrepeatable. The omissions matter as much as the presences—who is missing from the stage or the table, what relationships have shifted, what grief or joy people carry into the room that day (Jones 1994). All of it shapes what the performance becomes, and all of it vanishes when it ends.

“Nereson-Introduction DEMOCRACY MOVING.Pdf.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N8FqpQ1RD3amXqC-p6_ot7ulm8QxyACU/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.

“Taylor-Acts of Transfer.Pdf.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uN_t3RCLQEzSnzCQmQoCbM1nJQ_0Z-xM/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.

“Bill T. Jones Dancing to the Promised Land, VC B596, (0207504460875).Mp4.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/128uhMScne79KwPJZImAwjRWfrORRrRNQ/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.

Reparation ecology uses reparations as “a way of remembering how capitalism’s ecology has made the world—and our capacity to think and act—and of learning to interact with the web of life differently” (Patel and Moore 2017). Rather than reducing reparations to a single monetary payment, reparation ecology understands them as ongoing processes of redistribution, reimagination, and recreation—a continuous effort to repay debts and change the way we live. Justice, in this framework, must be understood in terms of both recognition and redistribution, not recognition alone (Fraser 2000). Reparations are not about the amount of money, but the sentiment and acknowledgment behind it (Tharoor 2015). They must also address the injury gap—the subsequent harms that compound the original injustice, including racial profiling, redlining, and generational trauma—as well as epistemic injustice: the distributive unfairness in access to information, education, and other epistemic goods (Fricker 2007). This raises an urgent question: how do we demand reparations within a capitalist society? They cannot happen at the institutional level alone. Individual complicity carries individual responsibility, and reparations must be taken up at both scales. Ultimately, reparation ecology is not predicated on retribution or anger, but on atonement—on the effort to “build bridges across lines of moral justice” (Bhabha 2021).

“Patel & Moore_Conclusion.Pdf.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JzgTtZzgOAWVv3TZpGGJy6qYh7ormeug/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.

“Fraser_Rethinking Recognition.Pdf.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rx2mwn_JrTpOqs3YssCkMpJpMljSzc_h/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.

OxfordUnion. “Dr Shashi Tharoor MP – Britain Does Owe Reparations.” YouTube, 14 Jul. 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4. Video.

“Jacqueline Bhabha_Intro_Time for Reparations.Pdf.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/16jGgFXcf-YcfCMokwy2JeuvTwbHGsNrc/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.

“Fricker_Epistemic_Injustice_Intro_Ch 1 and 7.Pdf.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OE5wottaVtO2G0djZuHsfkfweyFLBJd1/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.

In this portfolio, memorialization functions as an all-encompassing term for actions and structures of remembrance. It does not refer only to physical monuments, but also to museums, archives, local markers, media tools, myths, anniversaries, conferences, international mechanisms, and legal and institutional tools (Sturken 2018). Memorialization can occur at an institutional level as well as a vernacular one—the informal, grassroots, and often spontaneous ways in which communities commemorate the past, distinct from official, state-sanctioned monuments and narratives (Basher et al. 2022). At its most basic, memorialization is meant to provide a space for healing and reckoning for those affected by the events it commemorates. But it is never neutral. How institutions and individuals choose to remember people and events carries serious implications for the collective memory of a nation, and the structures and symbols communities use to mark calamity always reflect the broader political context in which they emerge, which is why institutional and vernacular memorialization so often diverge. The narratives memorials inscribe into the memories of those who view or participate in them can be selective or misinformed, shaping how entire communities perceive history and who belongs in it. When done with intention and accountability, however, memorialization can serve as a meaningful act of justice—a form of reparation for communities confronting the weight of historical injustice.

“Sturken-Cultural-Memory-in-Wake-of-Violence.Pdf.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oTwaV7F-SGG22hByj4fYO8dd8uj5pGcG/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.

Basher, R., & Ono, Y. (2022). Memorialization Tools for Systematically Expanding Disaster Risk Reduction Across Space and Time. Journal of Disaster Research, 17(4), 526–531.https://doi.org/10.20965/jdr.2022.p0526

Emergent strategy is “a strategy for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions; how we can intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for” (Brown 2017). Although the term does not appear in any other course readings, it may be the most applicable and versatile concept in this portfolio. Emergent strategy calls us to imagine just and liberated futures that are irresistible, casting us as “protagonists of what might be called the great turning, the change, the new economy, the new world” (Brown 2017), insisting on our agency and vitality in bringing that future into being. It asks us to look to Black, female, and young leaders for models of what to imagine, echoing Robin D. G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams in its insistence that liberatory vision begins at the margins (Kelley 2002). At its core, emergent strategy views social movements as practicing the world we most want to see universally at a small, fractal scale. It offers a way of being in right relationship with our home and with each other, growing a compelling future through the accumulation of relatively simple interactions. Every exchange, every small development, becomes an opportunity for learning and enacting justice. It values organic intellectualism, deriving wisdom from observation of the natural world and finding meaning in its patterned resilience. Of all the frameworks encountered in this course, emergent strategy is the most accessible practice of justice, and for that reason, it is my favorite.

“brown_Emergent Strategy.Pdf.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CEZjAfgiZ53QRLpeSix5lzCxwB59XAr4/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.

“Kelley_freedom-dreams_Preface and Intro.Pdf.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kl7bTt7ap1qnGp9feEdk0_ZS3ilyvZqq/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.

Perhaps the second most applicable term in this portfolio is nomos/narrative—held together here as a single concept because neither can be understood without the other. They are mutually inclusive and mutually sustaining. Each of us inhabits a nomos, a normative universe, or more realistically several nomoi at once. Personal narratives feed into larger ones, which eventually solidify into the universal truths by which we live (Albright 1997), and those truths become the norms we expect others within our nomos to abide by. Norms are not naturally occurring. They are created, perpetuated, and nourished as a nomos grows more populous and influential. We are constantly negotiating our sense of right and wrong, lawful and unlawful, valid and void—and in doing so, we are always already making and remaking the nomoi we inhabit. Personal narratives are inseparable from this process, which is why the personal and the universal are never truly distinct. As Cover writes, “no set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning… Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live” (Cover 1982). In this way, nomos and narrative function much like art—shaped by the personal experiences and ideologies of those who make and encounter it, bending toward justice or away from it depending on whose stories are centered and whose are suppressed.

“AnnCooperAlbrig_1997_EmbodyingHistoryEpicN_ChoreographingDiffere.Pdf.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LS7FfmHF6QojB1UwwDbQYqyNu9eYVAH2/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.

“Robert Cover-Nomos & Narrative.Pdf.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/161yUG07qYx7QV9yIAe48xsrFDW5qcXhR/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.

The state of exception can most simply be understood as the “emergency power” of government, typically justified during war, terrorism, or political instability (Agamben 2005). What began as a temporary suspension of law during crisis has become a permanent, normalized paradigm of governance in modern democracies—a dangerous grey zone where law and politics collapse into one another. Within the state of exception, there is no longer a meaningful distinction between public law and political fact: executive order overrides legal norms, and political violence is justified under the guise of legality. Scholars argue this permanent state of exception has been in effect since World War I, and its consequences compound over time. Surveillance expands in moments of emergency, but when emergency never ends, expanded surveillance simply becomes the new baseline. Probable cause erodes. The exception becomes the norm, and the norm becomes invisible. This slow normalization is precisely what makes the state of exception so dangerous—not a sudden rupture, but a gradual tightening that is difficult to name and harder to resist. This permanent condition has spurred creative acts of refusal. Hito Steyerl’s mock educational guide How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File confronts the near-impossibility of invisibility in a surveillance-driven world, where justice increasingly depends on who can and cannot be seen. The only available escape, Steyerl suggests, is to hide in plain sight: to remove oneself from legible systems so thoroughly as to become ignorable or erasable by those in power (Steyerl 2013). It is a bleak form of freedom, but within a perpetual state of exception, it may be the only one left.

“Agamben_The State of Exception_Ch 1 and 2.Pdf.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1opkiM7Z1rcjky4zTi5rl5tVu0xxwQF3x/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.

Video, Artforum. “Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013.” Artforum, 20 Apr. 2015, https://www.artforum.com/video/hito-steyerl-how-not-to-be-seen-a-fucking-didactic-educational-mov-file-2013-165845/.

Whiteness itself functions as a form of property in American law. Historically, American law recognized and protected the expectations associated with whiteness, rendering them functionally equivalent to property rights—a protectable, legally recognized interest that has only entrenched itself over time (Harris 1993). This legal legitimization of whiteness gave it a durability that outlasted the explicit laws that once codified it. The civil rights movement threatened this arrangement by demanding that Black people be equally respected and equally opportune, destabilizing the value, authority, and social ranking that whiteness had long guaranteed. But white supremacy does not contradict American democracy; it birthed it, nurtured it, and financed it (Coates 2014). Whiteness functions as an assurance: that a certain group of people, by virtue of ancestry alone, will never occupy the position to which Black people have been consigned. To maintain that order, white society needed Blackness to be legible, controllable, and containable, and so it manufactured a recognizable type, a caricature, consumed as entertainment and deployed as justification for slavery and, later, Jim Crow (Hartman 1997). The production of that caricature was not incidental but essential, a tool of dehumanization that made exploitation feel natural and inevitable. Like race itself, whiteness is a social construct, but its consequences are entirely material.

“Harris Whiteness as Property HLR.Pdf.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/19_hH4OO6NYqvEDFr8UnhZPmV4uBD8ih_/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.

Company, Moyers &. “Facing the Truth: The Case for Reparations.” YouTube, 23 May 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm9DJuTrO8Q. Video.

“Hartman_Scenes of Subjection_Ch 1.Pdf.” Google Docs, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wlpNHeyx5RSeYr6N6-toPpdM6YL-cwWj/view. Accessed 11 May 2026.