My first book, published by Routledge, examines how restorative justice—intended as a relational, community-led practice—has been reshaped through colonial and donor-driven policy transfers. Using Jamaica as a focal point, it critiques one-size-fits-all models and calls for justice processes rooted in local culture, history, and lived realities. Read more →
Baba: What We Carry, Repeat, and Repair — A Jamaican Girlhood tells the story of a Black girl growing up in 1980s Jamaica, navigating family fractures, racial politics, sexual violence, and the quiet, enduring devastations of caregiving, while asking how Black women might begin to repair ourselves whilst systems of colonialism constantly try to undo us.
Woven through these chapters is womanist theory and restorative justice, not as abstraction but as lived experience. The book frames healing as micro-decolonisation: the daily, imperfect act of reclaiming what colonial and patriarchal systems have stripped away. Memory itself becomes an act of repair; telling the truth— it unsettles families or fractures communities—becomes a way of insisting on wholeness.
At its heart, Baba asks urgent, universal questions: How do we carry what our families give us? What do we repeat when it harms us? And how do we begin to repair inside the same structures that taught us to endure instead of heal?.
© Leanne Levers. 2025. All Rights Reserved.