1st Workshop of the Working Group on Restitution and Repair | CRIA

The Podcast "Mourning the Dead": Connecting Histories of People, Places, and Remains

Speaker: Sophie Schasiepen
Date: April 3, 2025
Time: 2–4 PM (GMT: Lisbon, PT)
LINK ZOOM

Session Summary

The podcast Mourning the Dead: Connecting Histories of People, Places, and Remains brings together diverse stories connected to human remains and their violent displacement during or in the aftermath of colonial rule. These stories explore their significance in the memory of slavery, in anti-colonial and post-colonial movements, in memory politics, in the dismantling of scientific racism, and in restitution processes.

Focusing on histories related to the African continent, this podcast is presented as an act of mourning – a mourning that may inspire and strengthen present-day transformations.

> Episodes are available in English and French (and, in most cases, in a third language as well);
> The podcast is hosted on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, under the titles Mourning the Dead or Porter le deuil des morts;
> The podcast was produced within the scope of the exhibition Branching Streams – Sketches of Kinship.

About the Speaker

Sophie Schasiepen is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Western Cape and a curator at the House of Austrian History in Vienna.

About the CRIA Workshops on Restitution and Repair

From April to December 2025, the CRIA Restitution and Repair Group is promoting a new series of workshops dedicated to the topic of Restitution and Repair, following a similar initiative held last year.

Since 2023, the research group Practices and Policies of Culture—specifically its Working Group on Restitution and Repair—has been organising workshops that consist of seminars focused on restitution, including a wide range of related topics, such as: repair, decolonisation, history of anthropology, museology, re-signification, collaborative methodologies, healing practices, knowledge transfer, new historical narratives, and regimes and practices of access, ownership, data management, and the digitisation of collections and archives. The workshops also address the plurality of issues associated with diverse cultural, national, and transnational contexts.

The seminars involve discussions with specialists and other agents with experience in these areas, preceded by open debate sessions—available to the CRIA and IN2PAST communities—on scientific articles or other relevant texts. Unlike more conventional academic formats, the Restitution and Repair Workshops have an intimate character, aimed at fostering internal processes of learning, understanding, and emotional engagement with the materials discussed. With this in mind, we kindly ask anyone interested in participating to contact the coordinators of the PPC research group in advance.