This fall brings a series of regional conferences across the Partner institutions in CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery network. Curious about a particular legacy theme? Be sure to check out the conferences happening this month! Keep an eye out for more opportunities.
October 6–8 ● Sewanee: The University of the South (Sewanee, TN)
Memory Works: A Symposium on Remembering and Reckoning with Slavery’s Legacies
The symposium will spotlight ongoing initiatives that community organizations, colleges, and universities have undertaken, often in innovative partnerships, to identify, confront, and alter the legacies of slavery that still resonate in their local environments. It will bring together community leaders, museum professionals, scholars, and students in a small and friendly setting designed for generating conversations, sharing experiences, and workshopping new approaches to commemoration for a region that still reflects a century of fealty to the “Lost Cause.” Registration deadline: September 15, 2022.
Website ● For more information, email Kathleen Solomon (krsolomo@sewanee.edu)
Featured presenters: Karen L. Cox, Sharon M. Leon, Alicia Odewale, Jody Allen, Fanchon Glover, Burchell F. Pinnock, Vesna Pavlovic.
October 21–22 ● Lewis University (Romeoville, IL)
Confines of Place: The Intersections of Race, Place, Migration and Mass Incarceration as Legacies of American Slavery
Not enough attention has been paid to the histories and contemporary experiences of race, place, migration, mass incarceration and their intersections in smaller towns, cities, and suburbs. At Lewis University, located 35 miles southwest of Chicago, many enduring legacies of enslavement are present in policies and practices that have created and continue to sustain racial exclusion through contemporary realities of segregation, redlining, criminalization, and incarceration that disproportionally affect African American communities near the nation’s third largest city. This convening will bring together activists, artists, practitioners, scholars, students, as well as both formerly incarcerated and directly impacted people to illuminate lived experiences, research, visual art, music, and other creative practices on the themes of “Race, Place, and Migration” and “Mass Incarceration,” as well as wellness and healing as they relate to those seeking justice. Registration deadline: October 14, 2022.
Website ● For more information, email Tennille Allen (allente@lewisu.edu)
Featured guest: Reuben Jonathan Miller is a sociologist, criminologist, social worker, and associate professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. He’s the author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration.
October 28–29 ● Dillard University (New Orleans, LA)
Rising from the Depths of Slavery: Legacies of Cultural Expression
This presentation hopes to progress critical dialogue on Black agency and choices by engaging place, material culture, and space, through an alternative understanding of conceptual sites of conflict and resistance. Specifically, Dillard looks to contemplate sites and spaces associated with the slave economy to consider new transformative theories on Black resistance as liminal space for identity formation and societal transformation via strategies of cultural aesthetics such as foodways. Enslaved and free Black communities actively participate(d) in foodways and other strategies to either escape or circumvent gendered and racialized systems of oppression. These forms of aesthetics can also be understood as productions of knowledge and serve as an exploration for re-historicizing our difficult heritage as one of resilience, joy, and community building by enslaved Africans and their descendants. Registration deadline: October 20, 2022.
Website ● For more information, email Zella Palmer (zpalmer@dillard.edu) or Jessica Bantum (jbantum@dillard.edu)
Featured guests: Dr. Peggy Brunache is a lecturer in the history of Atlantic slavery at the University of Glasgow and the inaugural Director of the Beniba Centre for Slavery Studies; Dr. Ibrahima Seck is an assistant professor of the History department of University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar (UCAD), Senegal and the Director of Research at the Whitney Plantation Slavery Museum in Louisiana.