Social Sciences Webinar | Restorative Justice Practices Within Higher Education and the Arts: Addressing Complex Legacies of Harm, 5 August 2025

We are excited to invite you to a webinar led by the University of New Mexico and MDPI's open access journal Social Sciences (ISSN: 2076-0760), which will provide you with guidance on how to submit manuscripts to Social Sciences that promise to have a high impact on the scholarship in your research area.

We will provide this workshop in the context of our call for papers for a Special Issue in the Social Sciences journal entitled “Restorative Justice Practices in Higher Education and the Arts: Addressing Complex Legacies of Harm”. This Special Issue is informed by restorative justice practices, the scholarship of feminist decoloniality, and the history of higher education and the arts. We will facilitate discussions on universities confronting their past within social movements for educational equity and the arts, and the agency of creators and learners who demand their rightful place.

Articles in this Special Issue examine the experiences of groups that have been marginalized in higher education and the arts. Authors argue that complex legacies of harm, such as race, culture, citizenship, state and tribal sovereignty, globalization, and disability, require both personal and institutional reflexivity to unveil multidimensional experiences of perpetrators and survivors. We aim to publish the works of those charting a way forward to move beyond acknowledgment to correcting harm in higher education and the arts. It is our hope that this authors’ webinar will support contributors in this task.

Date: 5 August 2025
Time: 5:00 p.m. CEST | 9:00 a.m. MDT
Webinar ID: 891 1354 5300
Webinar Secretariat: journal.webinar@mdpi.com
Webinar announcement: https://sciforum.net/event/SocialSciences-1

Program:

Speaker/Presentation	Time in CEST/ MDT
Prof. Dr. Assata Zerai Chair Introduction	5:00–5:10 p.m./ 9:00–9:10 a.m.
Prof. Dr. Teresa Neely, Ms. Mariann Skahan, Prof. Dr. Kathy L. Powers and Ms. Pamela Agoyo Restorative Justice Practices Within Higher Education and the Arts: Addressing Complex Legacies of Harm	5:10–5:50 p.m./ 9:10–9:50 a.m.
Prof. Dr. Daniel McCarthy Peer Review Process and the Rationale for OA	5:50–6:10 p.m./ 9:50–10:10 a.m.
Q&A Session	6:10–6:25 p.m./ 10:10–10:25 a.m.
Prof. Dr. Assata Zerai Closing of Webinar	6:25–6:30 p.m./ 10:25–10:30 a.m.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information on how to join the webinar. Registrations with academic or institutional email addresses will be prioritized.

Unable to attend? Feel free to still register; we will inform you when the recording is available.

Webinar Chair and Keynote Speakers:

Prof. Dr. Assata Zerai, Department of Sociology and Criminology, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA;
Prof. Dr. Teresa Neely, College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA;
Ms. Mariann Skahan, Department of Anthropology, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA;
Prof. Dr. Kathy Powers, UNM Political Science, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA;
Ms. Pamela Agoyo, Division of Student Affairs, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA;
Prof. Dr. Daniel McCarthy, Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH, UK.

Relevant Special Issue:
“Restorative Justice Practices Within Higher Education and the Arts: Addressing Complex Legacies of Harm”
Guest Editors: Prof. Dr. Assata Zerai, Prof. Dr. Teresa Neely, Dr. Kathy Powers, Ms. Mariann Skahan and Ms. Pamela Agoyo
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 17 October 2025

This Special Issue of Social Sciences belongs to the Section “Crime and Justice”.