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The call for papers has been issued in advance of the eighth global conference on Slavery Past, Present, and Future. The event will take place in Vienna, Austria in June 2024. IU McKinney School of Law is a sponsor along with the University of Vienna Department of African Studies. IU McKinney Dean Karen E. Bravo created the event in 2015.

Themes for the conference have included 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, and anti-slavery initiatives and movements, among other topics. The 2024 event will begin on June 13 with a reception at the University of Vienna. An experiential component related to the event will take place June 14. The conference proceedings will take place June 15.

The conference is open to receiving papers on a variety of topics related to slavery. To learn more about submitting, visit the conference website. Proposals are due February 29, 2024.

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.

The eighth 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; Indiana University Europe Gateway in Berlin, Germany, in 2018;University of Innsbruck in Innsbruck, Austria, in 2019; in a virtual format hosted by IU McKinney in 2021; in person at Webster Leiden Campus-Webster University USA in The Netherlands in 2022, and in person at Webster University in Accra, Ghana in 2023.