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Slavery Past, Present, and Future, the annual global interdisciplinary conference and brainchild of Dean Karen E. Bravo, enters its seventh year in 2023. The first gathering of delegates took place in 2015 at Mansfield College, Oxford.

The idea to create a worldwide event involving scholars from a variety of disciplines was born five years earlier in Prague in the Czech Republic, where Dean Bravo presented her research on human trafficking, “Legal Constructions of Personhood and Their Nexus with the Traffic in Human Beings.” This was for a conference on Bullying and the Abuse of Power organized by Inter-Disciplinary.Net. It was such a rich environment for multidisciplinary learning and scholarship that she was moved to re-create it with a focus on slavery, Dean Bravo said.

Slavery Past, Present, and Future global meetings maintain a flat hierarchical structure with no keynote addresses and no titles. Instead, the conference is kept intentionally small in nature so that all participants can attend each presentation. “We all learn from one another,” Dean Bravo said. “Everyone attends everything. It’s all about learning across our individual disciplines, the joy of deepening our understanding, and networking with each other.”

Dean Bravo has a love of history and might have become an historian if the law had not captured her imagination. Originally from Jamacia, she recalled an essay she was assigned to write when she was around 14 years old on sugar and slavery. “There was a lot I did not know,” she said. “However, we know, because we had been taught, that people who looked like me were there in Jamaica because our ancestors had been enslaved to grow sugar cane. Others had been indentured from China and India.  Some people grew the sugar cane. Other people took the profits.”

Slavery PPF 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 topic of slavery.

As a small example of a topic the conference may examine, consider something as innocuous as a $5 t-shirt. Not everyone involved in its creation is being taken advantage of, Dean Bravo said, but it is likely that not everyone has the same access to human rights. “What are we not paying for? How can the growth of the cotton, production of the t-shirt, and shipment across the oceans be worth $5?” she asked. “Then think about the consumer. Maybe that’s all that individual person can afford. Why is that? Everyone is connected and is caught in this web of interdependence and potential exploitation.” The conference strives to find ways to untangle such webs.

The 2023 Slavery PPF conference will take place in Accra, Ghana, in July. IU McKinney School of Law is a sponsor of the event, along with Webster University Leiden and Webster University Ghana.

“We hope that holding the conference in Ghana will create more opportunities for participation by scholars and community members from the Global South as well as deeper understanding of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and its legacies,” Dean Bravo said.

The seventh conference will build upon the work of earlier events, which were held in Oxford in 2015, Prague in 2016, the IU Europe Gateway in Berlin, Germany, in 2018, the University of Innsbruck in Innsbruck, Austria, in 2019; in a virtual format hosted by IU McKinney in 2021; and in person at Webster Leiden Campus-Webster University USA in The Netherlands in 2022.