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
The podcast brings together different histories connected to the mortal remains of people and their violent dislocation during or in the aftermath of colonial rule; their meaning for the remembrance of slavery; their role in anticolonial and postcolonial struggles, memory politics, the undoing of scientific racism and the work of restitution. The podcast focuses on histories connected to the African continent. This collection of histories intends to present them as part of the work of mourning – a mourning that can initiate and strengthen transformation in the present.
All episodes are available in English and French, and most of them in a third language. You can find the podcast, which was produced in the framework of the exhibition 'Branching Streams - Sketches of Kinship' as 'Mourning the dead' or 'Porter le deuil des morts' on Spotify and Apple podcasts.
Sophie Schasiepen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Historical Studies of 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.
