Healing as Justice

Drawing on a long-term, in-depth case study in Guatemala, this open access book offers global lessons for reconnecting with our bodies, our sexuality, our spirituality, our human and non-human ancestors, our earth, and each other in order to heal the intergenerational harms of colonialism.Here Walsh distils her decade of work with the Centre for Training, Healing and Transpersonal Research (Q’anil)—an Indigenous-feminist experiential-learning collective that addresses the legacies of the patriarchal and racial violence of Guatemala’s internal armed conflict—in order to develop a compelling and timely intervention into global debates around transitional justice, healing, and decolonial practice. Walsh adopts a reflexive, collaborative, practice-oriented approach that incorporates her lived experience and includes contributions from collaborators, including the co-directors of Q’anil. Ultimately, Walsh makes an important contribution to debates around the concept of healing justice by situating it in Q'anil's context of transpersonal liberation psychology and thereby conceiving of it as a continual, embodied, communal practice—something beyond the state-led reconciliation and transitional justice initiatives that aim to administer final outcomes. For its deep ethnographic rigor, its theoretical sophistication, and its plainspoken, action-oriented lessons, this book is a must-read for researchers, students, and activist-practitioners interested in feminist, Indigenous-led, and and postcolonial approaches to teaching for social justice and socio-political development.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Galway's Domain-Leading Publication Support Fund.