Healing Justice

Healing Justice is a framework for responding to intergenerational trauma and structural violence caused by systematic oppression through feminist decolonial ancestral technological approaches rooted in collective healing. "Widely known as the organising framework used by the Black Lives Matter movement (#BLM)", healing justice framework is a political strategy that connects collective care with social justice and liberation work.

Background

Healing Justice emerged in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the United States in 2005 to respond to the physical, emotional, and spiritual toll of oppression and movement work faced by Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC) and queer feminist community organisers. Launched in 2006 through the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, the framework calls for decolonial community-based approaches to healing, resilience, and sustainability, situating collective wellbeing as integral to social transformation.

Origins

According to the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, authors, Shaw et al. 2022, the Healing Justice Framework "aims to address the collective harm and trauma experienced by marginalised and disadvantaged people due to the ongoing effects of living with structural violence and systemic injustice.". The framework was conceived as a political strategy in the southern United States by community advocates, feminist leaders,LGBTQIA+ activists, indigenous healers and organisers in 2005 through the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective. Formally launched in 2006, it emerged from movements responding to intergenerational trauma, state violence, environmental racism, and the burnout collectively experienced by frontline BIPOC organisers in the aftermaths of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita in 2005..

Contributors such as Cara Page, Erica Woodland, Prentis Hemphill, Adaku Utah and Southerners on New Ground (SONG) advanced the framework in line with earlier care traditions seen in the Black feminist health movement, Indigenous community healing practices, and liberation theology, incorporating harm reduction, Transformative justice, Restorative justice, Racial Justice, Environmental justice, Reproductive justice and disability justice architectures, emphasising collective care and communal resilience.

Core Definition and Principles

Cara Page defines Healing Justice as "a framework that identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence and bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our collective bodies, hearts, and minds".

Healing justice centres on several interrelated principles:

• Collective care and interdependence: Recognising that healing is a communal process rooted in shared responsibility and mutual support.
• Transformative healing: Addressing not only individual trauma but also the systemic and historical conditions that produce harm.
• Embodied resistance: Understanding the body as a site of both trauma and power, and using somatic, spiritual, and cultural practices as tools for resistance.
• Liberation and sustainability: Integrating rest, ritual, and wellbeing into the ongoing struggle for justice to sustain movements over generations.
• Rooted Ancestral Technologies: Healing Justice draws on ancestral knowledge and practices, emphasising the importance of cultural context and community-specific approaches as a resistance to the harm caused by medical-industrial complex (MIC).
• Decolonial practice and Feminist Leadership: It resists the Western medical dominance and centres feminist leadership by honouring ancestral knowledge and indigenous healing traditions and wisdom that predate heteropatriachal capitalist white supremacy narratives.

Global South and African Collaboration

Although the term healing justice emerged in the southern United States, many BIPOC organisers who developed the framework drew from ancestral healing technologies rooted in African, South American and transnational indigenous worldviews. The Healing Justice Lineages book traces these practices through African diasporic spiritualities, herbalism, and community healing rituals, highlighting how organisers reclaimed ancestral knowledge as part of their political, cultural and spiritual resistance.

African feminist movements co-created, engaged and expanded this frameworks by grounding its practice in Ubuntu and other Afrocentric methodologies that centre relationality, interdependence, collective care and communal responsibility.

This reconnection highlights the circular flow of knowledge between Africa and its diasporas, demonstrating that healing justice is not merely resonant with African traditions but is rooted in them, continually reinterpreted through African feminist praxis for collective care and decolonial liberation.

Known proponents of healing justice for systemic and collective transformation in Africa include Toyin Ajao, Director of Ìmọ́lẹ̀ of Afrika Centre, whose restorative healing work with marginalized communities is a central focus of her practice.

External links

• Kindred Southern Justice Collective
• Erica Woodland
• Cara Page

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