The Comparative Heritage Project, with support from the African Studies Institute, University of Georgia, is accepting paper abstracts and panel proposals for a four-day (May 6-9, 2024) 1st International Conference on Comparativity and Heritage Studies (ICCAHS) with theme Complicated Histories/Complex Heritages at Adeleke University, Nigeria. The conference will be in a hybrid format: in-person and virtual.

ICCAHS 2024 is informed by the ongoing work of the Comparative Heritage Project and seeks to critically engage complexities and complications around ideas and issues that concern the making/unmaking, masking, de-masking, and unmasking,  formation/de-/re-/formation of heritage within human society. This conference will interrogate layers of assumptions and human understandings of heritage, including, but not limited to formations of national, transnational, cultural, social, political, geopolitical, racial, ethnic, secular and/or religious understandings and use of heritages. In particular, we welcome papers that demonstrate how humans use texts, stories, legends, symbols, myths, and similar paraphernalia in normalizing positions of power and privilege as well as those that show the processes, histories, methods, and behavioral patterns that create orders and hierarchies in societies.  The goal of this conference is to critically reexamine and reappraise the use of prototype heritages in shaping human actions, whether for good and for nefarious purposes. The conference invites academic and professional practitioners of heritage to this Discourse on Critical Human Heritage with their implications for peaceful coexistence beyond the 21st century.