The Imagining Futures Project is proud to be a partner of AVReQ and the Legacies of Violence and Trauma’s Repair in the Global South conference.

Imagining Futures is a UKRI Network+ project, with the goal of exploring and building methodologies of egalitarian archival practice, which allow for the co-existence of multiple experiences of the past, and incorporate dialogues across generations, gender, and class. We are enacting these goals by funding various projects, producing a manifesto on egalitarian archival practices, and creating a digital repository, which will house the outputs of our projects. The project also supports the work of several MA students, based at Stellenbosch University, the University of Ghana, the University of Saint Joseph, and the University of Dar es Salaam.

These MA Fellows will be presenting their research at the conference and engaging in knowledge exchange with one another and other conference delegates. These discussions will inform a major output of the project, a Manifesto on Egalitarian Archival Practices.

Kodzo Gavua [IF co-investigator] is an Associate Professor of Archaeology and Heritage Studies and Director of the Leventis Digital Resource Centre at the University of Ghana.

He holds an MA and a Ph.D. from the University of Calgary, and an MA in International Affairs from the University of Ghana. He researches the effects of early cross-cultural interactions on society, culture, cultural heritage, and economic development in West Africa.

Gavua is the founding Dean of the University of Ghana’s School of Arts, a Trustee of the Ghana Culture Forum, and chairperson of the Ghana Heritage Committee’s Technical unit.

Elena [IF principal investigator] is a historian and archaeologist focusing on migration, hospitality, and displacement, which she has written about for the Red Cross, and in her monograph Migration Mobility and Place in Ancient Italy (Cambridge 2017), as well as in editing Displacement and the Humanities, with Evan Jewell.

She has worked with colleagues in Palestine, of Campus in Camps and Decolonising Architecture, to understand and move beyond the cracks in the nation-state regime, exposing the role of culture and heritage. She is a member of UNDRR/ICCROM expert panel on the role of traditional knowledge systems in disaster risk reduction.

Currently leading the team of Imagining Futures through Un/Archived Pasts (an AHRC, GCRF Network+), she is also Professor of Ancient History and Place at the University of Exeter, UK.

Aoife is a social historian, her research interests include humanitarianism, empire, gender, and inequality. She completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge and previously worked on digitisation projects at the National Library of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh.

In her role as postdoctoral researcher, Aoife will facilitate the co-creation of a Manifesto for Egalitarian Archival Practice. Aoife is also co-ordinating the activities of the MA fellows within the Imagining Futures project

Nancy Rushohora [IF co-investigator] is a Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies of the University of Dar es Salaam, University of Exeter honorary research fellow, and a postdoctoral fellow of the Studies in Historical Trauma and Transformation at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

She is a co-PI of the Imagine the Future through Un/Archived Past. Her research interests include the archaeology of resistance, trauma, heritage, photographs, and memory.

She is currently working on a digital project titled: Transgenerational Memories of the Majimaji War in Tanzania (1904-1908). She is particularly questioning the removal and restitution of human remains from Tanzania to Germany and engaging with the use of the war landscape, museum and memorials. She is currently working on a digital project titled: Transgenerational Memories of the Majimaji War in Tanzania.

Jihad Nammour is the Academic Coordinator of the Arab programme in Democracy and Human Rights. He is lecturer at the Institute of Political Sciences. Legal theory and Political sociology are his areas of study. Jihad holds a DEA in Law from Paris Nanterre University and in Political Science from Saint Joseph University. His latest research focuses on forced migration. He develops educational programmes within several Lebanese NGOs, including Sakker el Dekkene and Peace Initiatives.