Public Lecture

Organizers:

Date:

May 26, 2026

Time:

6:30 PM – 8:00 PM

Fee:

Free Entrance

Location:

Aula LSB, University of Aruba

Public Lecture – New Worlds: Demands for Reparatory Justice in Latin America and the Caribbean

Description:

Across Latin America and the Caribbean, Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities continue to confront the afterlives of African enslavement, native genocide, colonialism, racial violence and exclusion. Their demands for reparatory justice combine a backward- and forward-looking stance: they ask what kinds of futures become possible when historical harms are publicly acknowledged, materially addressed, and politically transformed. The presentation draws on doctoral research on reparatory justice in Ecuador and Jamaica, exploring how demands for reparation are articulated both from below, by grassroots movements and communities, and from above, by states, regional institutions, and international actors, considering how different claims for reparatory justice travel across local, national, regional and supranational spaces, and how they reshape debates about rights, history, memory, and justice. The presentation will also examine key approaches to reparation, including local and national repair in Ecuador, together with Jamaica’s national and regional affiliation to the Caribbean Community’s Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice. In doing so, asking what counts as reparation, who gets to define repair, and how reparatory claims challenge conventional understandings of human rights and responsibility. This presentation invites reflection on how these debates resonate in the Dutch Caribbean, including Aruba and the wider Kingdom of the Netherlands. Drawing on recent discussions in the Netherlands and the Caribbean, including work connected to the UNESCO Task Force on Reparatory Justice and conversations at the 2025 Caribbean Studies Association Conference in Sint Maarten, the lecture will open space to consider the possibilities and boundaries of reparatory justice across different colonial and postcolonial contexts.

The key provocation for this public lecture is what new worlds might reparatory justice help us imagine, demand, and build?

Speaker:

Shodona Kettle is a doctoral candidate at the University College London; her research focus is on demands for reparatory justice in Latin America and the Caribbean. She was a Fellow at the Reparations Finance Lab, the Centre for Reparation Research, and at the PJ Patterson Institute for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at the University of the West Indies, Mona campus in Jamaica. She is a member of UNESCO’s Reparatory Justice Dialogues. Shodona has upcoming publications on reparatory justice in the fields of education, minority rights, and policy. She is a host on the New Books Network. Shodona speaks French, Spanish, and Portuguese and is currently improving her Haitian Kreyol.

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