Finding What Is Ours is a one-day, in-person symposium widening access to ongoing work reclaiming African heritage knowledge systems.

Through enslavement, colonisation and their legacies our lands, our knowledge systems, our cultures, our languages, our communities, our families and so much more are scarred in ways that impact not only ourselves, but the planet we all live on.

The event is in response to the 'Sloane Lab' project and what we feel is an urgent need to properly frame Hans Sloane's collections held at the British Museum, British Library and Natural History Museum in the context of African enslavement and the extraction of African and indigenous knowledges (and labour).

With that in mind,  we have programmed a day of interactive workshops, presentations and provocations from leading African heritage thinkers and doers in reparations, ethnopharmacology and (digital) heritage practice in the UK, the US and the Caribbean. They will be sharing their work and their skills and addressing Sloane in the process.

Dr. Kirt Henry (Director of African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica & Jamaica Memory Bank) - (Documenting indigenous forms of culture such as Kumina, Pocomania, Gere, Kromanti and Maroon Culture) Dr Kirt’s session will explore how institutions established during the colonial period in Jamaica have taken steps to challenge the structural and epistemic legacies of colonialism. His presentation will focus on the role of the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica and the Jamaica Memory Bank in Jamaica’s decolonial project and the narratives and creative expressions of local communities as a grassroots methodology to shape its educational programming.

Professor Jessica Marie Johnson (John Hopkins University) & Dr. Nadejda Webb (John Hopkins University) - Johnson is the PrincipaI Investigator of Black Beyond Data which is, a Black studies computational and social sciences lab. Dr. Webb and Professor Johnson will be collaborating to share insights into Black digital practices, repair and social justice. Their workshop will ask the question 'what can dynamic collaborations between communities and institutional actors look like?' She will share the groundings of the We Live Language lab, reflect upon centering Black women cultural workers in the university classroom, and explore efforts to support community engagement in the archives.

Esther Xosei - is a Reparations Specialist, Director, Legal Advisor, International Advocate, Political Advisor, Media Spokesperson, Scholar-Activist, Environmentalist, Historian and Educator. Esther Xosei’s session will contextualise the issues the symposium engages with within the historical and contemporary activism around Afrikan reparations.

Dr. Damian Cohall (Dean at the Faculty of Medical Science in UWI Cave Hill, Barbados) - Dr. Cohall’s presentation and workshop will share his research findings linking folklore to ancestral and contemporary medicinal practices and culture. It will include practical exercises encouraging participants to leverage traditional technologies, such as plant medicines and folk-tales as part of their healing journey.