The Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice | CSSJ

The Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ) is a scholarly research center with a public humanities mission. Recognizing that racial and chattel slavery were central to the historical formation of the Americas and the modern world, the CSSJ creates a space for the interdisciplinary study of the historical forms of slavery while also examining how these legacies shape our contemporary world.

For the 2018–2019 academic year, the Center's work was organized around the following research clusters and projects:

Clusters

Human Trafficking. This project explores contemporary forms of human bondage and engages in public programming around this issue.

Race, Slavery, Colonialism and Capitalism.  This research cluster explores the way that race, slavery, and colonialism have shaped global capitalism.  This research cluster is reshaping scholar’s understanding of the history and growth of capitalism.  The project is co-led by CSSJ and the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam).

History, justice and Democracy.  This research cluster is a joint collaborative project between the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs and the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice that explores the making of the modern world, the historical injustices of colonialism and racial slavery and how historical and contemporary injustices shape practices of democracy?

Investigating the American Criminal Justice System. This project focuses on prisons and relations between the police and communities of color.

Freedom Archive. This project creates an inventory of materials in Brown University Library's Special Collections related to slavery and abolition to help scholars more easily access these items.

Race, Health, Medicine, and Social Justice. This cluster explores the history and persistence of structural racism in biomedicine as it intersects with economic and social conditions. We focus on reimagining the knowledge we produce about race and health from a social justice perspective.

Projects

Global Curatorial Project. This exhibition and curatorial project presents both the global interconnectedness of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade, as well as illuminates an alternative view about the history of our global modernity.

Slave Trade Film Project with Filmmaker Stanley Nelson. This research and workshop project aims to support the development of a multi-part documentary series on the Atlantic slave trade. Creating a New World: The Transatlantic Slave Trade will chart the economic and human cost of the slave trade across the Atlantic basin, underscoring how this expansive system of trade, violence, and profit built the modern world.

Heimark Artist-in-Residence. The Heimark Artist in Residence program brings to campus musicians, poets, visual artists, and performers whose work grapples with the legacies of slavery on our world today.

Slavery & The Americas High School Curriculum Project. This project seeks to create a high school curriculum that will challenge myths and absences in how our schools currently teach the history of slavery. This is a collaborative project with The Choices Program which produces award-winning curricula on current and historical international and public policy.

Seminar Series

CSSJ Advanced Knowledge Working Group. The CSSJ Advanced Knowledge Working Group is a seminar for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and other scholars affiliated with or working alongside the CSSJ to come together to think critically about the legacies of slavery and boundaries of freedom across time and space. The group meets for two hours every two weeks on Thursdays to discuss assigned readings and/or workshop dissertation/book chapters, journal articles, conference papers, and other works-in-progress. Throughout the academic year, this group will also host several locally-based, emerging scholars and artists to share their current research and projects with the larger campus community.

Carceral State Reading Group. The Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice facilitates a year long reading group which focuses on examining the Carceral State. The reading group is a collaboration between various sectors of the Providence community and the CSSJ at Brown University. Meetings are held twice monthly to discuss issues of imprisonment, incarceration, captivity, criminalization and policing historically and in the present day.

Slavery's New Materialism. This seminar is an interdisciplinary course that seeks to explore an emerging dynamic in Slavery Studies: a move away from an older materialist history that had foregrounded modes of production, class struggle, and capitalist transformation; and toward a new(er) materialism organized around human/non-human entanglements and drawing on recent theoretical work on things, networks, and assemblages.

Public Engagement

Slavery and Legacy Walking Tour. The Slavery & Legacy Tours examine the history behind Brown University, the State of Rhode Island and their roles in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The tours help students (K-12 +college) as well as adult groups think critically about the University and state histories. 

Civil Rights Movement Initiative. In 2015, the CSSJ developed a unique initiative for Hope High School students called the Civil Rights Movement Initiative. This initiative aims to help high school students understand the Civil Rights Movement as something more than events of the past, and as a bridge to understanding the present. Students meet for weekly classes at the Center and participate in a week-long visit to the South, visiting important sites in the Southern Freedom   

Visit www.brown.edu/initiatives/slavery-and-justice/

Image: Memory Dishes, April 2018, Providence RI, Photo by Rythum Vinoben

Visual Identities in Art and Design | VIAD

The Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD) is an independent and internationally recognised research unit based within the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA) at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). VIAD supports a diasporic community of artists, curators and cultural thinkers whose diverse research projects promote critical thinking around creative human practices formulated in response to the violent exclusions and legacies of colonial modernity and apartheid. In collaboration with local and international partners, VIAD supports these research activities through a programme of exhibitions, publications, and interdisciplinary platforms. 

VIAD’s conceptual vision for 2019–2021 centres around a new research and curatorial programme, entitled The Imagined New (or, what happens when History is a catastrophe?) - Thinking through Alternative Archives. Developed in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (Brown University), The Imagined New revolves around a three-year programme of workshops, exhibitions and publications. Building on VIAD’s focus to date on identity construction through visual practices in postcolonial contexts, projects supported over this period will contribute toward a critical rethinking of history-making and future-imagining within the historical paradigm – and contemporary afterlives – of racial slavery, colonial modernity and apartheid. Central to this focal area is how cultural and aesthetic practices are enacted as ‘living histories’ and ‘imaginings of the new’ within contexts of racialised, gendered and sexualised violence, and how such practices open to new ways of thinking about freedom, community and what it means to be human.

Background and Context

Established in June 2007, VIAD is housed in the FADA Building on UJ’s Bunting Road Campus. The Centre’s location within the urban metropolis of Johannesburg – the economic capital of Africa – is strategic, and in keeping with UJ’s vision to be "an international University of choice, anchored in Africa, dynamically shaping the future" (University of Johannesburg 2017).

Given its commitment to practice-led research in visual practice, representation and culture, and its purposeful interlinking of textual, conversational and creative outputs, VIAD has little precedent in the South African academy. A strong point of differentiation is that it fosters critical and dialogical relationships between theory and practice within an expanded socio-cultural framework of art, design and visual culture, and with a particular focus African and Afrodiasporic histories, experiences and practices. While textual outputs play a critical role in the development of VIAD’s academic capital, creative and curatorial research is recognised as occupying a central position in academic research processes, as they relate to art and design discourses. Research supported by VIAD takes the form of written outputs (solo or co-authored scholarly books, academic journal articles, chapters in edited volumes, and guest-edited special editions of journals); creative production (exhibitions, installations, performances, and other art and design projects); curatorial practices; and multiple platforms for knowledge dissemination and exchange (conferences, panel discussions, colloquia and workshops).

Research Projects

Current research projects supported by VIAD include:

The Imagined New (or, what happens when History is a catastrophe?) - Thinking through Alternative Archives. A 3-year interdisciplinary research collaboration with the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Brown University (to be accompanied by a series of 3 special edition publications in Callaloo). 

The Sojourner Project | Black Feminist Futures. A 6-day Mobile Black Studies Academy presented in collaboration with the Practicing Refusal Collective (convened by Tina Campt & Saidiya Hartman) and Art for Humanity, Durban University of Technology (DUT).

The JAG Consultations. Presented in collaboration with the Johannesburg Art Gallery: a series of public consultations and working group sessions focussed on key questions of museology in postcolonial, post-apartheid South Africa.

The Lesser Violence Reading Group. Presented in partnership between Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action (GALA), the Group offers an open, interdisciplinary discursive space for thinking around radical creative responses to questions of racialised, sexualised and gendered violence in South Africa.

E-book Publications. VIAD will shortly announce the publication of its first e-book, entitled Standing Items: Critical Pedagogies in South African Art, Design and Architecture. A new publication is underway, entitled Designing Apartheid. Interrogating the relationship between design and apartheid - origins, effects, legacies.

The Marvelous Real. Migration, Signs & Loas in the Art of Edouard Duval Carrié. Exhibition curated by Prof Anthony Bogues, scheduled for August 2020, Johannesburg Art Gallery.

In addition to the above projects, VIAD runs a dynamic programme of talks, seminars, book launches and other events in Johannesburg.

Visit www.viad.co.za | www.instagram/viad_fada

Image: Black Chronicles IV (curated by Renée Mussai), April 2018, FADA Gallery, Johannesburg, Photo courtesy VIAD