This series of events offers a productive space for members of local communities to explore and narrate our city’s rich history in conversation with faculty, staff, and students, to share strategies and offer opportunities for future collaboration. Framed around the theme of "unfreedom" as a historical lens through which to view New London's place within the wider setting of the Western Hemisphere and the Atlantic World, events highlight work done by local historians, students, creators, and community advocates.

Historically, “[Un]Freedom” describes the state of marginalized people denied human rights even when legally “free,” from enslavement for example. The concept helps us recognize the links between political rights and social rights, which rest on material needs and constraints. In a free and democratic polity, full citizenship requires access to the material requirements of a dignified human life. The persistence of “unfreedom” spurs us to take action to overturn the structures of coercion and material deprivation that have made freedom unobtainable for generations of people who call and have called New London home.