Events and Reunions for Old Members

You are warmly invited to join Professor Arathi Sriprakash, Professor of Sociology and Education, University of Oxford for this year's Omar Azfar Lecture, 'Reparative Futures of Education', on Tuesday 7 May 2024 at Balliol College.

It is almost a truism to say that schooling systems are structurally unjust. There are stark differences in educational offer and opportunity across the UK. This lecture explores the possibility of reparative frameworks to address the structural injustices of education systems – particularly relating to racial and classed dispossession. The idea of reparation requires us to understand the interconnections between past, present and future in both the formation of injustice and its repair. Arguably, until injustices are actively addressed, they can endure in social institutions – such as education – which also shape lives-to-come. But what does reparation in education look like? A new five-year participatory research project – Repair-Ed – seeks to explore this very question, focusing on the city of Bristol and its histories and geographies of inequality. Professor Arathi Sriprakash argues that injustice is not an inevitability in reparative futures of education: these are new, if challenging, horizons for the politics and practice of education.

Event details

Date: Tuesday 7 May 2024
Time: 5.00pm-6.30pm
Location: Balliol College
Cost: Free

If you would like to attend the Omar Azfar Lecture please contact the Development Office.

The Omar Azfar Lecture is an annual lecture series established in 2015 to honour the memory of Omar Azfar, who came to Balliol in 1987 to read PPE. Omar became an economist and specialised in the field of crime and corruption. He was strongly committed to the ideal of social justice, and passed away in 2009. The lectures are funded thanks to generous benefactions from Old Members and friends, including Omar’s parents, Kamal (Balliol 1958, Literae Humaniores) and Naheed Azfar, and his close College friends, most notably Jeremy Burchardt (Balliol 1988, Modern History).