Growing Southern Perspectives on Professions: Engaging on the Notion of Restorative Professionalism As an Emerging Southern Professional Logic

Drawing on insights emerging from a special issue exploring Global South Perspectives on Professions – this session seeks to provide a platform for critical engagement with the construct of Restorative Professionalism as an emerging Southern professional logic. Characterised by practices of repair, restoration, care and stewardship, restorative professionalism emerges not despite extreme structural constraint, but through it. Precisely in responding to the tensions, constraints and inequality structuring work systems professions seek to act as agentic disruptors, moving beyond reproducing existing practice to reinterpret, reorganise and reconfigure the conditions of work giving rise to more socially just forms of professionalism. In contexts marked by livelihood uncertainty, high burdens of mental and physical health pressure, unequal impacts from climate change and inequalities in digital access, such professionalism derives legitimacy from its capacity to renew damaged social relations, strengthen communities, and sustain collective futures.

The session invites conceptual and empirical papers that advances and critiques this proposition. We particularly welcome contributions that extend core debates from Southern cases and perspectives. Papers may examine how professional agency, jurisdiction, legitimacy, occupational closure, discretion, boundary work, and forms of professionalism are reconfigured under conditions of precarity, social inequality and environmental change. Contributions might explore how professionals enact repair, care and stewardship through everyday practice, and how this challenges dominant assumptions about autonomy, expertise, marketisation and professional authority. We encourage submissions that critically examine professions as sites of social restoration, institutional renewal and the reorganisation of work toward more equitable and sustainable futures.