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Shape of the Wound Restorative Justice in Potential Spaces: A Review of “Opening the Black Box: The Charge is Torture” (Exhibition, Sullivan Galleries, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2012)

Harper, Rachel L. S.
June 4, 2015

Source: (2013) Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 29(2):244-253.

This review is structured to reflect its two purposes. First, I begin with an overview of
the exhibition in order to discuss the content of Opening the Black Box and its unique
pedagogical dimensions. Secondly, I draw on critiques of restorative justice praxis to interpret
the exhibition as a representation of a restorative epistemology, and to begin to express its
transformative potential. Within this, I employ two related ideas from D.W. Winnicott (2009):
transitional objects and potential space. The art objects in this exhibition transition between the
experienced and the envisioned, while the collection altogether both creates and occupies a
potential space for a curriculum of restoration. (Excerpt)

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