The core of the project comprised a three day residential in which 15-20 participant teachers worked closely with experts in Caribbean slavery and its legacy. Over the course of its three iterations, the residential has included workshops from 13 different academic historians and guest lectures by playwright May Sumbwanyambe and journalist Alex Renton.
Each residential has included a workshop by Dr Peggy Brunache in which participants relate to the past through foodways, tasting and helping to prepare slave cuisine. Through these consumption-based learning activities, Brunache critiques and challenges historical studies’ narrow lens of the slavery archives through interdisciplinary and experiential practices. The act of ‘consuming history’ fosters an alternative narrative of Atlantic enslaved communities and a deeper understanding of daily slave experiences that emphasizes Black agency and joy, community building, and particularly Black women’s roles within slave subsistence practices as culinary resistance
