News Archive

The Sixth Global Conference on Slavery Past, Present, and Future, part of a multi-year interdisciplinary project created and organized by IU McKinney Dean Karen E. Bravo, is slated for July 11 through 13. The gathering will take place at Webster Leiden Campus-Webster University USA in The Netherlands.

Potential themes for the conference include defining slavery, slaveries of the past, human trafficking and other forms of contemporary exploitation, systems and structures of enslavement and subordination, voices of the enslaved, legacies of slavery, anti-slavery initiatives and movements, COVID-19 and slavery, and transitional justice.

The conference series brings together participants of different backgrounds and disciplines to discuss slavery, enslavement, and slavery-like exploitations in all its forms across time and geographies. By providing new opportunities for dialog across disciplinary and national boundaries, the conference series seeks to catalyze new insights and potential approaches, and the enrichment of knowledge on the topics of slavery. Delegates from across the globe take part in the event. Nations represented include Australia, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The sixth conference will build upon the work of earlier events, which were held in Mansfield College, Oxford University in Oxford, England, in 2015; Prague, the Czech Republic, in 2016; at the Indiana University Europe Gateway in Berlin, Germany, in 2018; the University of Innsbruck in Innsbruck, Austria, in 2019; and in a virtual format hosted by IU McKinney in 2021.