CFP – Displaced Indigeneity, Unsettling Histories: Forced Migration, Kinship, and Belonging

Displaced Indigeneity, Unsettling Histories: 

Forced Migration, Kinship, and Belonging

June 27 & 28, 2023 

Hybrid workshop to be held at the University of Glasgow & online.

Indigeneity often speaks to people’s deep historic, spiritual, and political connection with place. Yet the long history of settler colonialism has enacted multiple processes of displacement, through forced migration, land and resource appropriation, enslavement, resettlement, and concentration. While these violences have not always prevented Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous peoples’ kinship and belonging, displaced and disrupted Indigeneity has also had to create new methods of belonging within the dislocating experiences of an ongoing colonialism. 

This workshop seeks to make space for researchers – especially researchers who are Indigenous from postcolonial and contemporary settler states – to discuss the histories and legacies created by forced migrations and the critical fissures created by colonial pasts and presents. We intend this space to bring together historians and interdisciplinary scholars of Indigenous histories, broadly defined, from around the world, and for it to be the start of an ongoing conversation about Indigenous enslavement, displacement, and mobility from pre-invasion and colonisation to their resonances in the present day. 

The workshop includes two outstanding keynote speakers – Andrés Reséndez (University of California, Davis) and Nancy Van Deusen (Queen’s University, Canada) – who are among the leading scholars in the field of global Indigenous enslavement studies, especially within the Latin American context. The workshop will also offer a public lecture from Caroline Dodds Pennock linked to the release of her major new trade book on Indigenous peoples, free and enslaved, in early modern Europe. It also offers a guided visit to the newly renovated Tlaxcala Codex in the University of Glasgow's Special Collections.

Organised by: 

Leila Blackbird (University of Chicago), Caroline Dodds Pennock (University of Sheffield), and Julia McClure (University of Glasgow)

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words by January 30, 2023 to Julia.McClure@Glasgow.ac.uk.

Sponsored by: 

Beniba Centre for Slavery Studies and the Global History Research Cluster at the University of Glasgow.