Workshop III 
The Properties of Social Justice  

Debates on reconciliation frequently call for “a harmonious social order through healing and reciprocal acceptance” (Ernesto Verdeja). However, such appeals are often reluctant to address the fundamental terms on which a culture may need to transform itself so that historical injustice no longer generates socio-economic inequity in the present and future. In an effort to zoom in on this tension, our workshop screens discourses of reconciliation in the US and Canada through a framework of legal and cultural studies with a special focus on questions of property. Building on research at the intersection of these fields, we are interested in the crucial and ongoing role of law in forming, legitimating, and rationalizing processes of settler colonialism and intersectional oppression. On the one hand, we want to critically engage with the ways in which legal and material dimensions are (and are not) brought into contemporary cultural discourses on reconciliation. On the other hand, we want to debate visions of alternative approaches to future social justice that demand novel ways of unpacking the past in conversation with our invited guest experts Brenna Bhandar (University of British Columbia) and Patricia Williams (Northeastern University).