School of Social and Political Science

Description

Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (DOHR) is an educational innovation developed with former residents of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children to support truth-telling, learning, and responsibility in the aftermath of systemic and institutional harm. The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children was a child welfare institution founded in 1921 with the aim of providing care for African Nova Scotian Children who were not welcomed at white orphanages and institutions. Founded in the context of systemic anti-Black racism in Nova Scotia the operations and experience of the residents were profoundly shaped by this reality. The residents of the Home experienced significant harm and abuse that was silenced for many years. In response to former residents’ long journey for justice, the Nova Scotia government launched the NSHCC Restorative Inquiry in 2015 explicitly the first Inquiry to take a restorative approach.

The Digital Oral History for Reconciliation (DOHR) project emerged in direct relationship to the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children Restorative Inquiry in support of this unprecedented public inquiry designed as “a different way forward,” oriented not to adversarial proof or the allocation of blame, but to meaningful accountability through relationships, understanding, and concrete pathways forward.

DOHR is an interdisciplinary community-driven project co-created with former residents and community partners to develop a learning resource— including oral histories and a virtual reality experience—so students and wider public can engage difficult history in ways that build understanding, responsibility, and more just relations bringing silenced histories into public light in ways that support collective transformation.

In this presentation, Dr Kristina R Llewellyn (Wilson College of Leadership and Civic Engagement, McMaster University), Director of DOHR, and Professor Jennifer J Llewellyn (Chair in Restorative Justice and Director of the Restorative Research Innovation and Education Lab Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University), DOHR team member and a former commissioner on the Restorative Inquiry, introduce the DOHR project as a practice of justice-oriented learning: an approach to educational design that treats learning not as an “after” of justice processes, but as part of what justice requires when harm is systemic, relational, and sustained over time. Drawing on DOHR’s development and use, we explore how a restorative approach can guide the creation of learning spaces that center and empower those most affected; that are oriented to dignity, care, and responsibility; and that support public engagement with difficult histories without reproducing harm through spectacle, simplification, or retraumatization.

The talk will consider what it means to design educational resources and learning processes that are accountable to communities, grounded in lived experience, and directed toward future-facing transformation. It will reflect on DOHR’s relationship to the Restorative Inquiry as a justice process oriented to learning and structural change, and on the broader implications of this work for educators and institutions seeking credible responses to historical and ongoing injustice. The presentation will be relevant to audiences interested in restorative justice, justice transformation. educational innovation, and the challenges of redress for institutional and systemic harms—including how community-based research initiatives can support learning that strengthens collective responsibility and the capacity to build more just relations over time.