Dean Bravo Organizes and Hosts Third Global Conference on Slavery: Past Present and Future at the Indiana University Europe Gateway in Berlin
07/19/2018
The Third Global Conference on Slavery: Past, Present and Future, part of a multi-year interdisciplinary project organized by Dean and Professor of Law Karen E. Bravo, took place in Berlin July 9-11. Dean Bravo hosted the conference at the Indiana University Europe Gateway. The project provides new opportunities for dialog across disciplinary and national boundaries on the subject of slavery.
Delegates came from across the globe – the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, South Africa, Switzerland, Spain, and the United Kingdom – and from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, including law, international relations, anthropology, history, social work, and economic and political sciences.
The participants’ papers addressed slavery in a variety of temporal and geographic spaces; analyzed the nature and meaning of slavery from legal and social science perspectives; explored the legacies of slavery in contemporary societies around the world; and discussed and learned human trafficking and other contemporary forms of exploitation and victim service programs and projects.
The Third Global Conference built upon the first and second Global Conferences on Slavery Past, Present and Future, which took place at Mansfield College, Oxford in 2015, and Prague, the Czech Republic in 2016.
Inspired by increasing public and academic awareness and discussions of slavery and its legacies, and modern forms of exploitation such as human trafficking, Dean Bravo proposed the project and originally collaborated with an Oxford-based pioneer in interdisciplinary and transnational academic gatherings, to hold the first two global meetings. She now organizes the multi-year project in collaboration with an international steering committee.
Dean Bravo’s paper, Black Interests in Today’s Slaveries, explored the interests and perspectives of Diasporic Blacks with respect to slavery past, present, and future. In addition, Professor Achim Förster, LL.M. '06, a media and copyright scholar and professor at the University of Applied Sciences Wuerzburg-Schweinfurt, discussed his paper, A Family of Man? Depictions of People in Visual Communication.
