Conference
Transnational Conversations: Heritage, Memory, Climate, and Reparatory Justice in the Caribbean, Europe, and Beyond
- Date
- Wednesday 29 October 2025 - Thursday 30 October 2025
- Location
- Location to be announced.
In the context of the NWO-Veni project ‘Places To Not Forget’, and the book project ‘Slavery & the Dutch State: Dutch Colonial Slavery and Its Afterlives’, this two-day conference will comprise keynote lectures, research and book presentations, and panel discussions.
See the Call for Papers.
There is an urgent need for dialogue and discussions about reparatory justice with regard to memory and heritage in transnational geographies. Across the insular Caribbean, Europe and beyond, individuals, communities, and political institutions are confronting pressing questions of colonial slavery and its afterlives. Among the questions are the discourses of colonial violence and its legacies, forcing politics to (re)think historical accountability. Environmental and climate issues, along with the reconfiguration of heritage practices and memory, remain integral to global calls for reparatory justice that are echoing worldwide. However, too often we neglect a transnational perspective that opens new avenues to fully comprehend how contemporary politics, social movements, and academic discourses on reparations intersect with critical approaches to the colonial past and colonialism.
About two decades ago, France recognized slavery as a crime against humanity, and European countries such as the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Spain have also acknowledged their colonial legacies. In the ensuing years, reparations discourses and movements have intensified, particularly within the CARICOM – Caribbean Community.
This conference will bring together multiple disciplines to provide a solid basis for new knowledge that will enhance and deepen discussions on reparations in the Caribbean as well as the region’s connection to Europe and beyond. Engaging with reparation debates in the Caribbean moves beyond Eurocentric notions of repair, which are all too dominant, particularly in Europe. Grassroots movements not only demonstrate that broader notions of repair are needed but also carry inherent insights about what these notions entail.
Climate and environmental issues inform us about colonial scars imprinted on postcolonial geographies evidenced by eroded and deforested lands, impacting the current lived experiences of communities, while climate coloniality continues to shape ecological futures. Furthermore, understanding how heritage and memory practices influence contemporary mobilisations of reparations is a ongoing process. This conference offers a platform for discussion, networking, and knowledge production through which we question the new modes of engagement that scholars, activists, grassroots, and heritage practitioners are developing, thus linking reparatory justice to environmental and heritage justice.
This conference will offer avenues for groundbreaking discussions underpinning diverse fields, including heritage and memory studies, history, environmental humanities, political science, law and policy studies. The main questions addressed are: how do heritage and memory practices, and climate coloniality shape contemporary understandings and mobilisations of reparations?; and how do historical and political dynamics influence the reparations narratives in the Caribbean and their connections with Europe?
This conference will tackle the challenges posed and seize opportunities to advance scientific debates and societal discussions on issues that recognise colonial slavery and its afterlives while critically advocating for global solidarity and a common future. The scientific and societal debate will be launched by a plenary session during which the book Slavery & the Dutch State: Dutch Colonial Slavery and Its Afterlives will be presented. While discussions on colonial slavery and its afterlives have become increasingly relevant in academia, the relationship of this topic to reparations, memory, environmental challenges, and heritage must still be critically articulated. A broadened discussion on the notion of redress by scholars from the Caribbean, Europe, and beyond will widen our understanding of justice for historical wrongs.
Keynote Speaker
Ana Lucia Araujo is a Professor at the Department of History, Howard University, USA and 2025 Heinz-Heinen Senior Fellow. She specializes in the history and memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and is particularly interested in the visual and material culture of slavery, and she is the author or editor of over fifteen books.
Her recent books include Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (second edition 2023) and The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (2024). Her latest book is Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery and was published with the University of Chicago Press in 2024.
Her work has been recently supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ), the Getty Research Institute, the American Philosophical Society. In 2025, she was awarded a John Solomon Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Routes of Enslaved Peoples Project and among others she is the member of the editorial boards of the journal Slavery and Abolition and African Economic History.
