Freedom and slavery in a contemporary world
DIIS researcher Sine Plambech is onboard new European ERC Advanced Grant research project entitled "Modern Marronage? The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World" The project is headed by Professor Julia O'Connell Davídson at University of Bristol.
A group of researchers will explore how contemporary antislavery campaigners invoke the history of Atlantic World slavery to highlight the plight of 48 million people today living in exceptionally harsh circumstances, described as ‘modern slavery’. Yet in a world where many are oppressed and exploited, the lines between ‘modern slavery’ and other forms of drudgery, exclusion, and domination, are not easily drawn.
Through fieldwork in Brazil, Ghana, Italy, Portugal and the UK with groups that appear in dominant discourse as at risk of ‘modern slavery’, its key aims are:
- to shed light on the perception, pursuit and practice of freedom by marginalized and rightless people in the Atlantic World today.
- to use insights from this dialogue between past and present to contribute to theoretical debates on freedom, and its relation to agency, honour, gender, age, race, mobility, property, and personhood.
- to work with research participants to co-produce counter-narratives to conventional antislavery stories of ‘modern slavery’, and, by communicating them through performance as well as text, encourage more nuanced popular and political debate on the contemporary meaning and practice of freedom.
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