Slavery Studies: Where Academics Meets Activism

##Part 1

Over the past year at UWC Dilijan College, I have been developing and teaching a multi-disciplinary course devoted to the subject of slavery. The aim of this course is to explore slavery from as many different perspectives as possible, and to take action towards ending it.

There is so much to say about slavery. It has carved an ugly but distinctive contour on every period of world history, and continues to define cultures, identities and economies across the world. One way or another, slavery has affected every nation in every time period, and its practice persists to this day in ways that few of us recognize, despite being illegal in every country. How much human suffering has slavery caused over the centuries, and how much of our wealth today can be attributed to it?

A great number of things have aligned for me in the Slavery Studies course. It has been equal parts academics and activism, and we have seen learning outcomes informing personal ethics, shaping a wider discourse around injustice and inequality within our school. It has also brought together different academic disciplines with a tremendous sense of coherence - historians, philosophers, scientists and artists say so much in agreement on the topic of slavery, while at the same time all saying something unique. But most importantly, the priority of understanding and ending slavery resonates deeply with UWC values. In studying and teaching topics about slavery, I have felt more aligned with the UWC mission statement than at any other time in the decade that I have taught here.

Over the past year, I ran a pilot version of the course with a small group of dedicated students. We met once a week after school, usually with seminar-style classes or guest lectures. We started out by studying first-person narratives of slavery, for example Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs. We connected this with a study of African American spiritual music, one of the few modes of self-expression granted to those enslaved in the American South. (Listening to spiritual music and learning about its legacy was actually what first made me think about a course devoted to slavery. As Frederick Douglass said, “the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.”)

Nobody but an enslaved person could ever understand the real horrors of slavery, but is there also something about slavery that only an academic can understand? History explains how and why, over the period of about three hundred years, seventeen million people were sold into slavery and transported from Africa to the Americas, and how the entire industrial revolution was underpinned by slave economies in the West Indies. What was the character and shape of racism in slave-holding societies? How did people defend slavery; how did it become so entrenched in European law, and how did it finally collapse? What are the economic arguments for ending contemporary slavery? These are the types of questions that Slavery Studies explores and there is so much potential for researching and teaching social, economic and humanitarian issues through the lens of slavery.

For example, philosophy and cinema about slavery can teach us something about the power dynamics at play in today’s society. Slavery rests on the conception (or lack thereof) of freedom, property and personhood. But what does it mean for a human being to be owned? Is it even possible? Hegel explains slavery as a battle for the mind: in order to subdue the slave, the master must negate him through cruelty and dehumanization, until he ceases to view himself as a person. But a strange thing happens as a consequence: in seeking to dominate, the master becomes dependent on the slave, since he needs the slave to recognize him as the master. This power inversion can be seen in Steve McQueen’s recent cinema classic, 12 Years a Slave: it is not enough for plantation owners like Epps to extract the labor of their slaves; they must also be their overseer, their punisher, and their abuser, and through such acts of torture and narcissism, the master proves himself to be the inferior of the slave. So for Hegel, the ownership of a human being is a contradiction which reveals and then corrects itself on our journey towards freedom.

The Slavery Studies course is still only in its early stages, but it could grow into something really important. What I taught this year was only scratching the surface, and I am left eager for the opportunity to develop the course further. I will outline my goals further in a future blog post, but will end here by saying that Slavery Studies is a modular course which can be adapted to specific schools and contexts. Students from all backgrounds ought to be interested in it, and any teacher with sufficient enthusiasm should be able to teach and add their own to it. I believe that the relevance of this course to UWC is self-evident, and I hope that it can become a part of a UWC renaissance, as we continue to examine our methods and curriculum, and how it is that we go about making education a force for change in the 21st Century.

###Part 2

In my last blog post, I introduced Slavery Studies, a multi-disciplinary course that I have been designing at UWC Dilijan College. The course is in its infancy, but over the coming year I hope to turn it into an open-source curriculum that can be taught at many different UWCs, and perhaps other schools as well. I am seeking collaboration, input and funding for this ambitious project. I hope to see it evolve into something that can be challenging and life-changing for students by deepening their understanding of injustice and inequality. I also hope it will actively contribute to the global fight to end modern slavery. In this post, I will go into some more details about the principles behind the Slavery Studies course, and some of the challenges that I have faced in designing it.

Slavery Studies is and ought to be flexible. Rather than a set curriculum where everyone reads the same things and learns the same concepts, the course should instead provide the materials and frameworks for every teacher and student to find their own path. Nevertheless, there are some principles and guidelines that help give the course shape and direction.

The first principle is that this is a course specifically about slavery. This might sound obvious, but I have found it to be an important cornerstone. While researching the course, I have discovered many tangential interests that blur the line between slavery and other forms of exploitation. Following this principle has helped me place them to one side, and hence retain a sense of purpose in the course. For example, the Stoic view that everyone is a slave (ie. a slave to their passions) resonates with a lot of people in the modern workplace, and the Marxist view that slavery is indistinguishable from Capitalist labor is still relevant in certain fields of Economics. These ideas are fascinating in themselves, but also threaten to dilute the focus of the course. I view slavery as something strictly definable, needing study in its own right. If we learn something about human nature or about the nature of capitalism along the way then great, but that is not the goal. The goal is to study slavery itself, from as many different perspectives as possible.

The second principle is that the Slavery Studies course should look at slavery from across the world and across history. This is undoubtedly something I failed at the first time around; as you might have noticed in my first blog post, the pilot class became very preoccupied with the African-American slavery. The reason for this was simply that slavery in the Americas has been widely written about, and hence this was the first material to come to hand. The benefits of diversifying the course are self-evident, and this is a top priority for the future development.

Historians have doubtless written more about slavery than anyone else, and the most thorough way of presenting a course on slavery would surely be from a historical perspective. I attempted this early on, but quickly came to the conclusion that it was impossible! The history of slavery is so vast that it would take years to cover, and any course which prioritized historical narratives over others would soon cease to be multi-disciplinary. I chose, therefore, to place history in the same rank as other resources, and not to prioritize historical timelines or explanations in terms of structure or class-time.

Instead, I have found that organizing the course around themes is more engaging for students and more effective for new teachers to work with. This is my third principle. Following themes makes the course truly multi-disciplinary, while at the same time allowing for flexibility and freedom. A class could study a theme for a month or so, bringing in three or four different subjects and perspectives, choosing which dimensions to explore in detail, and finishing with individualized student projects. The themes I have rested on thus far are:

Slave experiences -Why does slavery occur? -Freedom and resistance -Slavery’s legacy -Contemporary slavery Of course, the real work is in researching these themes extensively and finding material for each of them—work that I have only just begun. This article is not the place to go into any more detail, but I will be happy to engage with anyone who is interested to learn or contribute further.

The fourth principle, eluded to already, is that the Slavery Studies course should be assessed through personalized student projects. I think that Slavery Studies is a perfect platform for project-based learning, and there is so much potential for students to do authentic research into specific areas of interest from different parts of the world. Student work should draw on what they are learning in class, but also go beyond it, and creative and unconventional work should be encouraged. Essays and research projects are obvious choices, but what about creative writing, artwork, performances or poems? Slavery Studies offers a great opportunity for us to move away from traditional, exam-based forms of assessment, and allow students to take charge of their own learning.

The final principle is that Slavery Studies should take an ethical stance, and should expect some sort of activism from students and teachers. It is easy for educated people to talk about slavery in the abstract, but our comfort and protection from it can also blind us from the horrifying realities that 40 million contemporary slaves wake up to every day. We must not be agnostic about this; learning about slavery makes it our responsibility to do something about it, and some sort of action should be a requirement of every student in the course. In UWC Dilijan, our action after two semesters of studying slavery was to hold a focus week. We had information sessions and discussions with the whole student body, letter-writing campaigns focused on corporate accountability, and Skype interviews with charities who work to end slavery. The feedback was tremendously positive, with many members of the community expressing how they changed their consumer habits on account of what they learned. Maybe in a few years our slavery focus week could begin to have an effect outside of the school as well. Ending modern slavery is no small task, but to know about it and do nothing is unacceptable.

In the past two blog posts, I have shown that the Slavery Studies curriculum has a great potential for multi-disciplinary, project based, international education, with an emphasis both on academic and contemporary humanitarian concerns. I believe that this curriculum must be developed further, and I am looking for help. Rather than a pet project, I would like to see this become a wider conversation, with buy in from across the UWC network. If we get it right, it could become a real distinguishing part of the UWC education, and something that is truly impactful for our students.