USA Africa Dialogue Series - CONFERENCE POST ON H-NET LISTSERV

Please, post on H-Net listserv. Thanks

 

Kwabena Akurang-Parry

kaparr@ship.edu

Shippensburg University

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR AN INTERNATIONAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE

 

Re/framing Unfree Labor, Abolition and Emancipation across Time and Space: A Conference in Honor of Professor Paul E. Lovejoy

DATE: May 22-May 24, 2014

 

VENUE: Jaria Hotel, No. 1 Levender Street, East Legon-Accra, Ghana

 

During the past half-century or so, the study of slavery and debt-bondage, abolition and emancipation, and very recently child labor in the contemporary era, all related to the political economies of states and societies, has engendered a great diversity of fields that are marked by increasingly refined questions and perspectives. In this regard, one recent focus has been on contemporaneous abuse of the body and labor of the child, the woman, and the poor across the globe, both in industrialized and non-industrialized countries. This call for papers in honor of Professor Paul E. Lovejoy of York University, Toronto, Canada, will re/frame some of the issues that inform topics in the constituencies of unfree labor across time and space.

A prolific scholar, Lovejoy has been an uninterrupted incandescent light in the field of slavery, debt-bondage, and abolition in Africa. Another plank of his work is the ways that slavery configured the African Diaspora and the broader Atlantic basin. Problematizing child labor in Africa and the African Diaspora in historic and contemporary times, Lovejoy is among scholars who continue to chart new pathways by asking ever more piquant questions in the field that relate research to life and wellbeing. Some of his perspectives on child labor have found a niche in recent works by other scholars who show that postslavery labor, in so many ways defined by the ongoing epoch of unidirectional globalization and its economic tentacles, has paradoxically increased systemic inequalities and actually expanded the charted frontiers of pre-abolition forms of child labor. With child labor, human and sex trafficking, and modern slavery documented to be rife worldwide, the United Nations, governments, NGOs, etc. are making great efforts applying research, teaching, information dissemination, policing, and so on to end them. It is well to note that Lovejoy and his Harriet Tubman Institute are actively partnering organizations such as Alliance and UNESCO to cast light on and curb unfree labor worldwide

We invite you to come to this international interdisciplinary conference, contribute a paper, and engage in discussions with diverse scholars in honor of Professor Lovejoy's prodigious contributions to research, teaching, and activism in the field. The proposed conference, among others, seeks to refurbish and rethink staple conclusions; provide syntheses of emergent historiographies; offer seamless refinements to extant theories and paradigms; furnish new empirical and theoretical perspectives on structures/features and agencies of slavery and debt-bondage, abolition and emancipation; and examine the political economy of contemporary child labor and modern slavery as well as proffering recommendations to curb them. Plenary speakers will include eminent scholars and peers of Professor Lovejoy.

 

Papers based on all inter/disciplinary approaches are welcome, including archeological, cultural, historical, anthropological, sociological, political-economy, and World history perspectives.

 

POSSIBLE topics include, but are not limited to the following:

·       Emerging perspectives on slavery and abolition in Africa

·       Assessments of the works of Paul E. Lovejoy

·       Paul Lovejoy and his generation of historians of slavery and abolition

·       Lovejoy's training of African historians of Africa and their works

·       Critique of theoretical frameworks on slavery, abolition, debt-bondage, and child labor

·       Rethinking the osmotic currents of abolition in the Atlantic Basin

·       Slavery and the making of the African Diasporas

·       Slavery and abolition in Africa, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean & Southeast Asia

·       Slavery and abolition in "settler societies," e.g., South Africa

·       Slavery and abolition in the Islamic world

·       Slavery and abolition in the "West" Atlantic: North America, Latin America, Caribbean

·       Slavery, abolition, colonial rule, and decolonization

·       Gender, slavery and debt-bondage/pawnship

·       The paradox of former slaves as slave-holders

·       Christian missions, slavery/debt-bondage, and abolition

·       Slavery and the reparations debate

·       Connections between slavery, debt bondage, caste systems, and child labor

·       Child labor in post-slavery/emancipation societies

·       Child labor, gender, family, and community initiatives

·       Child labor, migration and urbanization

·       Child labor, globalization, and out-sourcing

·       Child labor in agriculture, fishing, porterage, trade, domesticity etc.

·       Child labor trafficking – agencies, avenues, structures, and movements

·       Child labor, insurgency, violence, civil wars, and terrorism

·       Child labor and rural/urban economies

·       Child labor and children's rights

·       Rural/urban lifestyles of child laborers

·       The UNO agencies and child labor

·       The emerging middle-class and child labor at the home

·       Child labor and forced marriage

·       Routes and monuments of slavery and the slave trade

·       Teaching slavery and the slave trade in the 21st-century classroom

·       Emancipation, reconstruction, apprenticeship, and social formation

·       Slavery, memory, and identities in Africa and African Diasporas

·       Oral history and the study of slavery and abolition

·       Indigenous agency in slavery, abolition and emancipation

·       Public intellectuals, the media, and discourses on slavery & reparations

 

REGISTRATION FEES ARE AS FOLLOWS:

·       Students based in Ghana - 50 Ghana cedis

·       Faculty/scholars based in Ghana - 150 Ghana cedis

·       Students based in other African countries 50 dollars

·       Faculty/scholars based in other African countries 150 dollars

·       Non-Africa-based students - 80 dollars

·       Non-Africa-based faculty/scholars - 200 dollars

** Please, note that we will provide a conference website that address payment options, etc.

SUBMISSION DEADLINES: Abstracts of approximately 400 words should be submitted by October 25, 2013. For panel submissions, submit a 200-word panel abstract and a 400-word abstracts for each individual presentation. Acceptance of abstracts will be made known by October 31, 2013; and full papers should be submitted by February 15, 2014.

CONTACTS: Please, send an abstract of your proposed topic, institutional affiliation, and contact information to the following:

 

Kwabena Akurang-Parry

Department of History

Shippensburg University

Shippensburg, PA, USA 17257

E-mail kaparr@ship.edu

Phone 717 477 1286
Fax 717 477 4062

AND

 

Femi J Kolapo

History Department

University of Guelph

Guelph, Ontario, Canada

E-mail: kolapof@uoguelph.ca

Phone 519 824 4140 Ext. 53212

Fax: 519 766 9516