In this episode of Restorative Works!, host Dr. Claire de Mezerville López speaks with Dr. Tahirah J. Walker, Chair of the Department of Community Engagement and Leadership at Point Park University, about the connections among restorative justice, community, education, writing, and joy.
A writer, teacher, restorative justice practitioner, and scholar, Dr. Walker challenges the idea that writing and learning must happen in isolation. She shares how she has come to understand writing as a community practice and reflects on the writers, artists, and thinkers who have influenced her approach to community engagement. She also explores the role of humor and joy in helping people recognize their shared humanity, particularly when addressing difficult or complex issues. Drawing on poet Toi Derricotte's idea that joy can be an act of resistance, Dr. Walker considers how intentional joy can become part of restorative practices.
Dr. Walker also discusses her experiences applying restorative practices in public defense and K-12 education. Her work with public defenders showed her how approaches centered on restorative practices can emerge, such as developing mitigation stories for people facing sentencing. She contrasts that experience with her work alongside educators, where she encountered more resistance to restorative practices and gained a deeper appreciation for the complexity of creating change within school communities.
Dr. Walker is a writer and teacher whose work explores the intersections of Black womanhood, community, and expression. She holds a doctorate in rhetorical studies, and her work is influenced by the brilliance and insight of Yona Harvey, Brian Broome, Deesha Philyaw, Damon Young, Tony Norman, Kendra Ross, and INEZ. Tahirah endeavors to reflect the vibrant and unapologetic voices that make Pittsburgh feel like home.
Transcription
Claire de Mezerville López
Hello everybody and welcome to Restorative Works!, a podcast where learning, practice, and research open new paths for transformation. My name is Claire de Mezerville López, and it is my joy to introduce our guest, Chair of the Department of Community Engagement and Leadership at Point Park University, Dr. Tahira Walker. Dr. Walker, hello, welcome to the podcast.
Tahirah Walker
Hello. Thank you, Dr. de Mezerville Lopez. It's so lovely to be here with you. Thanks for inviting me.
Claire de Mezerville López
I am so looking forward to this conversation, but before getting started, allow me to introduce you to our audience. Tahira J. Walker is a writer and teacher whose work explores the intersections of Black womanhood, community, and expression. She holds a doctorate in Rhetorical Studies and currently serves as chair of the Department of Community Engagement and Leadership at Point Park University in downtown Pittsburgh. Her work is influenced by the brilliance and insight of Yona Harvey, Brian Broome, Deesha Philyaw, Damon Young, Tony Norman, Kendra Ross, and INEZ. Tahira endeavors to reflect the vibrant and unapologetic voices that make Pittsburgh feel like home. She is a two-time recipient of the Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh grant, an honor that continues to shape and support her creative projects. Tahira cherishes her family roles, especially those of mother and partner. She believes in exercising the power of joy as resistance. Despite this fullness of heart, she's still processing the tragic day when Beyoncé's Renaissance tour stop in Pittsburgh was canceled. But she has moved forward with grace, sarcasm, and a healthy amount of self-care items for her favorite shop, Plants for Skin. Tahira has lived in and around Pittsburgh for over 25 years. And Dr. Walker, I have so much to ask you. I really want us to talk about community, but having read all of this, let us start with you. As a writer, please tell us about your writing and how writing has also been a community experience.
Tahirah Walker
Yeah, I really love this question. I think that we are socialized to think of writing as a solo act and even to think of it as something you either have a talent in or you don't. So, it's been really wonderful for me over the last few years to sort of reframe that thinking, to think of writing as a community act and to think of it as something to explore and find joy in. I'm delighted by every mistake I make and every nuance I'm able to find. So that sort of is my writing practice now.
Claire de Mezerville López
That is so beautiful, and I can deeply relate to that. Things that seem solitary, they actually have a community resonance to them. You mentioned how your work is influenced by the brilliance and insights of many different people. Would you like to highlight one or maybe a couple? And what are the teachings from that person that we need to continue to learn when it comes to community engagement?
Tahirah Walker
Yeah, so, these people are all super important to me. And interestingly, there's some of them that I've been able to build that writing community relationship with, even after being influenced by them, which is truly a blessing. I can't express enough what a gift it is to, you know, be able to reach out to some of them and see what they're working on or see how we might be able to collaborate. I think that one thing that each and every one of those people has that I'm just so incredibly influenced by is a sense of humor. Each one of those people, to me, is a deeply funny person. Funny in a way that is communal, right? Like each of them is very good at looking at what makes whatever the us is we're talking about, whatever it is that makes us us. And then playing with that a little bit and being like, you know, let's think about, you know, whether there's something funny about what makes us us. And I think the importance of that is that you then don't lose sight of being a group of humans, having a human experience. I think that if I had to highlight just one, it has to be Dr. Kendra Ross.
Tahirah Walker
I think that she is the person who has influenced me the most when it comes to restorative work, justice practices, etc. And a lot of that I owe to her really thorough marking of creative input from Black women and Black feminist thought. So, she's the one that I would highlight here.
Claire de Mezerville López
I love that. And I love that you mentioned humor. You also say that you work on joy as resistance. I remember I had the honor of being your student in many different ways. And I remember in this one class where you said, we're going to be talking about heavy issues. We will make room for joy. And well, part of joy is humor, and part of joy is other things. But I just thought that that's such a significant teaching.
Tahirah Walker
Yeah, thank you so much. And it was a pleasure learning with you. I like to say too, teaching is learning, learning is teaching. And you and your cohort just really are so special and dear to me because I think we did a lot of the growth work together. The statement, joy is an act of resistance, actually comes from a poet named Toi Derricotte. So I don't want to leave the amazing Toi Derricotte out of that conversation. I've been doing a lot of work on figuring out what that means in terms of my words and actions, right? So, you know, I think that we sort of think of joy as a feeling, right? It's an emotion for many people, and I've been trying to articulate it as so much more than that. And so I'm happy to do that in any venue that I get the opportunity, especially in community engagement learning, where, yeah, we were talking about so many really heavy things.
Claire de Mezerville López
And I think that, I don't want to say sentiment; I will say intention. I think that intention of seeing these things as part of our work goes in many different directions. Mariam Caba also said that hope is a discipline. So, I think that those are the things that we really grab to when we're talking about restorative work.
Tahirah Walker
Yeah, absolutely.
Claire de Mezerville López
So Dr. Walker, you are also a restorative justice practitioner and scholar. Will you please tell us a little bit about that?
Tahirah Walker
Yes, I started working in a space that was restorative justice-oriented, actually as an alternative to my academic career. There was a moment when I've been working in academia now for going on 21 years. It'll be 21 years in August. And I got to a point where some of the ways that you see higher education behaving in the manner that it was originally intended in the United States, you know, privileging landholding white men, was really, really difficult for me to deal with. And so, I decided that I would walk away and be what I was calling an independent scholar. And one of the ways that I was planning to support myself was by doing consulting. I had the absolute pleasure of consulting for an office of public defenders, attorneys who represent people who were unable to purchase and retain legal services for themselves. And it was a relatively large office in my view, like being among this group of people who had a job to defend folks, some of whom were dealing with life sentences. Some of them were dealing with having been accused of doing some extremely heinous things, extremely heinous things that impacted entire communities, not just a particular victim. Of course, people affected by certain things are often feeling that in community anyway, but with this particular group, they were looking for the best ways to show up for these folks. And I would listen to a lot of what they were doing and I could connect it to my understanding of restorative justice theory. And in some cases, they were teaching me what that was. There were folks working there, both at the investigator and attorney level, who were helping me with that. But there were also people there who had no idea that that's what they were doing. But the way that they actualized, for example, writing a mitigation story to help someone with mitigating sentencing was restorative in nature. And that they were taking these principles, these ideas that I had learned from IIRP and putting them into their everyday work. And it was so inspirational for me because I felt like, you know, it's one thing for us to study it and, you know, for me to ideate about it or even to be in an external community about it. It's another thing for people to be working with folks who are in prison. Or in, jail waiting for sentencing. So I spent a little over a year working with those folks, and that really shaped the sort of foundation of my practice itself. The other thing that I had the opportunity to do as a consultant was work with K-12 teachers. And these were folks who were mainly across the state of New Jersey, which is my home state; I love it. And we worked on restorative practices, so the distinction being that you're not talking about people who are in the criminal legal system. You're talking about people dealing with infractions that go as far as a principal or a school board, right?
But because we know there's this really strong connection from schools to prisons, it really opened my eyes to a lot of how I could be helpful at an earlier point. Interestingly, working with K-12 folks presented me with more challenges to the restorative field. Yeah, yeah, there were lots of moments where, essentially, you know, the narrative that I had to push back against was, "This stuff doesn't work," right? Like, you know, circles you want to do. This restitution to the community, "it doesn't work." And I really had to pull forward tools that challenged me to be prepared for that in a way that I didn't in the actual criminal legal space.
So that was my background. I am also the child of a man who did an amazing recovery walk. My father was what I call an NA warrior. And as most people will know, when you work a 12-step program, you are often doing amends, and you are often doing a version of restorative work. And so, I think that, you know, as a child, internalizing that really informed my restorative work career too.
Claire de Mezerville López
That's incredible, and it gives me so many more questions that I will continue to ask when we come back from the break. Everyone, please stay tuned.
Welcome back to Restorative Works. Tahira, as you're describing your experience with K-12 and that we get to experience sometimes more pushback than in the justice system, I have so many questions as to why that is. I wonder, with my own experience in Costa Rica with the juvenile justice level, that maybe when we're trying these things, the people that are working with these young men and women, they know that what the system is doing is not really working. So, trying new things is something that we feel very prompted to do. I wonder if that's part of the difference in why, in K-12, we experience more pushback from adults, but I don't know if that resonates with your experience.
Tahirah Walker
I think that is definitely a factor that you're talking about introducing something in a much murkier set of waters where there is so much need. And this is not to suggest that the criminal legal system doesn't have a similar level of inequity. But I did notice that in the K-12 system, the way that inequities show up are far more stark, at least in my own experiences of doing restorative justice work for those years. I also think that in the K-12 space, or we're talking about people who are under the age of 25, we're talking about an ever-changing human being. And so I think that for many of them, this was like, you know, you want structure, you want something really harsh, right? Like you don't want to be trying all of these, what some people might consider to be, "loosey goosey" things. And I used to go back to something my aunt taught me. So my aunt was a middle school teacher who went on to work for the teacher's union where she lived in the district of Camden in New Jersey, is one that people would consider to be relatively tough. And I remember my aunt saying to me that one of the things you have to do when you're working with a child in that age range is to figure out who showed up today, the adult or the child, and proceed from there.
And I think that for my K-12 folks, a lot of what they were doing with their scholars was to find out who was there that day and then go on from there. You're also working in an ecosystem where you are doing restorative work that has far more implications and far more people involved. So, you're not talking about just working with someone who is on defense; you were talking about working with a child, loved ones, sometimes other teachers, right? Like there's a lot involved. So, you know, I think the responsible thing for me to say would be, I don't know. And I don't know that what I experienced is gonna be the same across, you know, other people's experiences. But I do remember just feeling so much compassion for these teachers and administrators. They were doing so much with so little sometimes, you know, and they might talk to a colleague in a town over who had double the amount of money to spend on their stuff, you know what I mean? Like that was really, really suboptimal, as they might say. So, you know, it was really a walk of compassion. And I think that all of those moving parts contributed to what I experienced.
Claire de Mezerville López
I think showing up with that heart of compassion is so important for all of us that do this work. As we get close to wrapping up this conversation, I wanted to go back to community, but still keeping us in education. I was your student in many different ways, as I just mentioned. And you always invited us to be a learning community. So as we get close to finishing, what are ways, Dr. Walker, that you believe that we can build community in the classroom?
Tahirah Walker
Ooh. Absolutely, I think a learning community is important. I will start with saying that the first thing to do is to ensure everyone in the room that they are safe. I firmly believe that people do not learn from one another when they feel threatened. They do not learn from one another when they do not feel that they can show up as themselves. Like I never want to pressure people to do awkward self-disclosures, but I want them to know that certain things matter. What pronouns you use matters. It matters that other people call you by your name. That matters. So, some of those things I see as sort of community basic needs. I do see joy and humor also as a central component of how you build a learning community. And then I would say the thing that I am most, like I will go to bat for this every time is we need to give people the ability to say, I don't know. And also, what if I was wrong? Right? Like I think in learning communities that I've been in, there's been so much fear of having to go back and say, you know what, I got that wrong. And so, I tried to celebrate mistakes, tried to celebrate typos, and things like that, because I really think that that is a cornerstone of how you do it. There has to be curiosity. There has to be an embracing of the human experience of being wrong sometimes and not knowing.
Claire de Mezerville López
Yeah, I love that. And even though I know we're past our time, but I just have to say when I revise papers from my students and I find typos, I get so happy. I know this is not AI. This is my kid. I'm loving this. Dr. Walker, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
Tahirah Walker
Yeah. It's exciting, right? Yeah. Thank you. This was delightful. I appreciate you so much.
Claire de Mezerville López
And I appreciate you and thank you all for tuning into Restorative Works. To learn more about our guests, log on to IIRP.edu and let's continue to build transformation through dignifying relationships, kind conversations, and stronger community. Until our next episode.