2012 Conference Overview

Abolition, Past and Present:
Scholars, Activists, and the Challenge of Contemporary Slavery

November 8-10, 2012

Yale University

Luce Hall Auditorium,
34 Hill House Avenue
New Haven, Connecticut

In order to put past and present in lasting dialogue, this conference combines some of the world’s most distinguished historians of slavery and abolition with many of the most important activist-leaders in the current movement to counteract and abolish modern forms of slavery. The gathering will be one effort toward forging a field of study about the origins and nature of current human trafficking and bonded labor systems in the world. By use of rich historical analogies, comparative perspectives, international contexts, and real world examples of intervention, we will explore and use the past in order to see deeper into the challenges faced by governments, non-governmental organizations, scholars, writers, and concerned citizens. We further hope to place the complex problem of contemporary slavery within the history of modern ideas and regimes of human rights. This is a conference where the worlds of scholarship and international activism meet, in similar and different ways to eighteenth and nineteenth century abolitionists, to curtail and ultimately rid the world of this ancient - and very current - problem of human exploitation.