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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 21 take training workshops at IIRP to become a qualified restorative practices facilitator. With her educational background that includes earning a graduate certifi- cate in Lehigh’s Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies program, she thought literature would be an excellent source to examine for restorative justice examples. “Sarah’s dissertation shows how contemporary U.S. literature works have value because they inspire creative thinking about social justice, thereby pulling readers into evaluation of larger social changes that might address urgent issues in our communities,” says Dr. Mary Foltz, associate professor of English and Heidebrink-Bruno’s dissertation adviser. “For her, these select works can serve as creative fodder for imagining societal transformations.” With a Ph.D. on the horizon and a range of teaching and student and academic affairs administrative expe- riences that she gained while at Lehigh, Heidebrink- Bruno is looking ahead to career possibilities. “I think my Lehigh graduate education has been so much more diverse and expansive than I originally imagined,” says Heidebrink-Bruno, who received the English department’s 2020 Digel/Jones Graduate Teaching Award. “I have been lucky that Lehigh, and my department in particular, has allowed me to try different things to figure out what I might like to do, what I feel passionate about and what I might do in the future.” ● “The characters have to have those difficult conversations about what happened. They have to come to their own understanding of justice and of redemption,” Heidebrink-Bruno says. Piercy published the science-fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Tim e in the 1970s during the height of the women’s liberation movement. The book’s protagonist, Connie Ramos, mind travels into the future and sees a post- apocalyptic society rebuilding itself with progressive ideas. “What I like about Woman on the Edge of Time is that Piercy takes the initiative of all these imagined kinds of ways of being in a community with each other. She really thinks through the details of life. How would people live? How would labor be divided? If something goes wrong, how do you deal with it?” she says. In her dissertation, Heidebrink-Bruno compares the worming ceremony in Piercy’s novel to a real-life restorative justice circle where a facilitator meets in a circle with the victim, the offender and other supporting members of their community. In the novel and in real life, all parties have to consent to participate and there are certain dialogue guidelines to follow. “For my research, the worming ceremony is a really good example of that part of imagined space coming from a literary author. What if more people did this in real life?” Heidebrink-Bruno contemplates. Planning to defend her dissertation this spring, Heidebrink-Bruno is considering the fiction novel LaRose by Native American writer Louise Erdrich as the final narrative for her research. Published in 2016, the story tells of a hunter who accidentally shoots and kills his neighbor’s 5-year-old son. The setting takes place on and around the Ojibwe North Dakota Indian reservation. According to the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP), healing and assimilating individuals back into the community are vitally important in Native American justice philosophy and practice. A member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, Erdrich infuses in her writing her knowledge of restorative justice used in indigenous customs in the tribal community. “ LaRose gives me a more interdisciplinary lens with tribal law and thinking about other ways of addressing trauma that are not just about punishment,” says Heidebrink-Bruno. “We might feel better initially if the person who did us harm gets punished in some way, but it is not necessarily a long-term solution. There might be other psychic wounds that are not fully addressed by a court decision. These are gaps that I am interested in looking at.” Restorative justice first sparked with Heidebrink- Bruno during a graduate course, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, when she was writing a paper about sexual violence. Through her research, she discovered the restorative justice concept and its use to help victims heal from violence. The concept and its practical applications resonated with her. Early in her Ph.D. program, she received Lehigh funding to “ If we were not just concerned with justice as a form of revenge or justice as a form of punishment, what would that alternative community look like?” CHRISTINE KRESCHOLLEK Sarah Heidebrink-Bruno ’13G ’21G