Series on Justice and Content Governance: Restorative Justice Workshop
Julie Shackford-Bradley, Sijia Xiao, and Niloufar Salehi
Sponsored by the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group (AFOG).
This fourth and final session of the Series on Justice and Content Governance will be a hands-on workshop focusing on restorative justice.
Online harm such as sexual harassment or non-consensual image sharing is a prevalent issue on social media platforms. These platforms tend to address harm through content moderation: the review and removal of content that violates the platform’s rules and banning repeat perpetrators. Content moderation follows a punitive justice approach, where it responds to harm by centering the offending party and regulating their offending behavior through punishment. This approach may leave survivors out of the decision-making process and fail to adapt to their individual experiences and needs.
Restorative justice teaches us to focus on those who have been harmed, ask what their needs are, and engage with the offending party and community members to address the harm collectively. In the workshop, the discussants will introduce offline and online restorative justice philosophies and practices, and participants will do design activities in small groups to explore how to apply restorative justice to specific online harm scenarios. We will then discuss the potentials and challenges of online restorative justice in the larger group.
Discussants
Dr. Julie Shackford-Bradley
Dr. Julie Shackford-Bradley is the co-founder and coordinator for the Restorative Justice Center at UC Berkeley. She has 15 years experience teaching in global studies and peace and conflict studies, with a research focus on traditional and community-based justice in international and local contexts. She is a trained mediator and restorative justice practitioner.
With the RJ Center, she conducts trainings and circles on the UC Berkeley campus and in the local community, supervises research projects regarding campus and community-based issues pertaining to conflict, justice and reconciliation, and facilitates internship programs and other collaborations with San Francisco Bay Area Restorative Justice organizations. She has facilitated trainings for staff, faculty, and students at Stanford, St. Mary’s of California, Mills College, University of Puget Sound, and beyond. Her specific RJ interests include applications of restorative processes for sexual violence and sexual harassment, equity and inclusion, and racial healing. Outside of work, she loves to hike around the Bay Area and create textile art with fabrics she has collected from around the world.
Sijia Xiao
Sijia Xiao is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the UC Berkeley School of Information co-advised by Niloufar Salehi and Coye Cheshire. Her research focuses on human-computer interaction and social computing. Recently, she has been working on issues related to online governance and online harassment. She is particularly interested in how alternative justice frameworks such as restorative justice and transformative justice may apply to those issues. Another line of her work is about people’s sensemaking of conspiracy theories and misinformation. She received a master’s in human-computer interaction at Georgia Tech in 2019 and a B.S. in computer science at Peking University in 2017.
Moderator
Niloufar Salehi
Niloufar Salehi is an assistant professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. She studies human-computer interaction, with her research spanning education to healthcare to restorative justice. Her research interests are social computing, participatory and critical design, human-centered AI, and more broadly, human-computer interaction (HCI). Her work has been published and received awards in premier venues including ACM CHI and CSCW and has been covered in VentureBeat, Wired, and the Guardian. She is a W. T. Grant Foundation scholar and also co-directs the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group (AFOG). She received her Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 2018.
Contact
If you have questions about this event, please contact Niloufar Salehi.
