This year they have commissioned Malik Al Nasir of Fore-Word Press to co-convene a unique symposium commencing on UNESCO International Slavery Remembrance Day (23rd August 2021) and concluding on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (25th March 2022).
Malik Al Nasir , University of Cambridge PhD researcher and Dr Leona Vaughn , University of Liverpool Research Fellow, invite the preeminent scholar, historian and author Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, to open the 2021 CSIS symposium Barriers to Black Academia: Slavery and Colonialism and the Case for Reparative Justice .
Sir Hilary’s keynote lecture will discuss the barriers to representation for Black academics in the UK, historical and contemporary, consider research methods and approaches to slavery research and make the case for UK universities to develop a radical vision for reparative justice.
Professor Sir Hilary Beckles Keynote Lecture - Barriers to Black Academia
Speaker Biography
Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, 8th Vice-Chancellor of The University of the West Indies (The UWI) is a distinguished academic, international thought leader, United Nations committee official, and global public activist in the field of social justice and minority empowerment.
His seminal study, “Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Slavery and Native Genocide in the Caribbean” (UWI Press, 2015), is an economic history of the rise of British Capitalism in the 17th to 19th centuries that provides the evidentiary basis of the claim for reparatory justice for the genocide of the native community, the globalization of African enslavement, and the deceptive indenture of Asians that followed, described as “three acts of a single play”.
Sir Hilary chairs the CARICOM Reparations Commission and is Expert advisor to the “Futures of Higher Education Project”. This project is led by the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (UNESCO-IESALC), and is intended to “generate innovative and visionary ideas about the purpose and functions of higher education.”
Sir Hilary shaped the architecture which brought to fruition the first-ever Caribbean Reparatory Justice initiative as a development framework, via a 20-year commitment of a £20 million investment between The UWI and Glasgow University in Scotland to create the Glasgow-Caribbean Centre for Development Research.