We are delighted to invite you to join us at Congress Expo 2023 organized by the Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences at York University between May 27 and June 2, 2023. At the Congress, the 8,000 participants intend to celebrate the knowledge, culture, and perspectives of Black and Indigenous individuals, while prioritizing a range of voices and ideas from scholars, policymakers, graduate students, and community members.

In partnership with the Digital Slavery Research Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder, WWW will relaunch its powerful LiberatedAfricans.org website. The relaunch is organized as part of the Canadian Association of African Studies (CAAS) annual meeting on June 1, 2023, at 10:30 am in the Expo Theatre, York University. Project director, Henry Lovejoy of CU Boulder, will explain how the website records the lives of over 700,000 people who were indentured under labor contracts that were disguised as liberation from slavery when in fact the global campaign for emancipation introduced a new form of servitude. The initial website which was made public in 2015 demonstrated the scope of the British campaign to abolish the slave trade, while the expanded version includes comparable actions by countries other than Britain. The newly upgraded user-friendly and interactive interface has streamlined navigation, cartography, visualization, and enhanced accessibility features of this pioneering project in African Studies.

The relaunch of liberatedafricans.org highlights the activities of WWW’s team of graduate students, professional developers, and academic collaborators who will showcase their work on related digital projects at a Booth (#707) exhibit of Congress Expo 2023. The featured projects include equianosworld.org (Project Director, Paul E. Lovejoy of York University), visabarrier.ca (Project Director, Meredith Terretta of the University of Ottawa), metareality.org (Project Director, Katrina Keefer of Trent University), enslavedafricansinearlyontario.ca (Project Director, Natasha Henry of York University), and slaveregisters.org (Project Director, Vanessa Oliveira of the Royal Military College of Canada). These other projects are discussed in formal panels at the CAAS conference between 29 May and June 1, 2023.

View our full press release below. Follow us on our social media channels below to watch the live broadcast of the Liberated Africans relaunch...

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