Enslaved people in Barbados continuously resisted and contested slavery. Advertisements about self-emancipating people (“runaway slaves”) in colonial newspapers are documentary evidence of the agency of the enslaved and their struggles for self-emancipation. Drawing Self-Emancipation, an initiative of HeritEdge, is an art competition and exhibition that invites residents of Barbados ages 16 to 21 to produce works of art that reimagine the past and develop new narratives and alternative interpretations through speculative approaches. By way of imagination and artistic creativity, young artists are invited to submit 2-dimensional artworks that explore who these individuals were and the possible liberated and empowered futures they crafted for themselves.
Read more information for the competition here.
Colonial newspapers in Barbados carry hundreds of advertisements about medicines, healing practices, and apothecaries in Bridgetown. A digital collection of these advertisements and their transcriptions is being developed, as well as a dataset of materials and medicines mentioned. This project will soon have its own page. Stay tuned!
The masquerade traditions of St. Kitts and Nevis form part of the nation’s intangible cultural heritage since the 1890s. Recently, the Department of Culture in St. Kitts and Nevis recently completed a submission to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.
This project will complement this important work in three ways: a) an art exhibition (June 22-27, 2026) that will demonstrate the different ways in which artists have and continue to interpret these traditions over time; b) a crowdsourcing event during the exhibition opening that aims to collect stories, photographs, and memorabilia; and c) a digital collection that will be offered open access online. The project is being developed through a partnership between HeritEdge and Bougainvillea (St. Kitts). For the exhibition flyer, see here.
Through an Open Educational Resource grant by the Digital Library of the Caribbean, we have developed a set of primary sources and an accompanying guide and activities to provide teaching resources for the slave trade into the Caribbean, centering the role of Barbados as a primary port of arrival of countless slave ships and the logistics underpinning the sale of the trafficked Africans.
The guide aims to do three things: a) to highlight the ways the Slave Trade was reflected in contemporary newspapers in colonial Barbados, and the ways the press facilitated the process of dehumanization; b) To foreground the human factor behind the heavily quantitative aspect of databases, both in terms of the plight of the enslaved and the engagement of multiple actors in the Slave Trade’s several stages; and c) to provide qualitative insights and information to enhance the experience of researchers engaged in research on the Slave Trade.
You can access the primary source set and teaching guide here.
Under development. A dataset of memory institutions (archives, libraries, museums, and small community collections), focusing on Barbados, as a start and aiming to become part of larger Caribbean initiatives. Having readily available information for these institutions or communities and their collections in one place can aid in disaster management and risk prevention. It can also aid organizations to seek help with their collections.
Projects seeking volunteers
Get in touch to learn more about our projects. We provide guidance and detailed instructions for the projects below. We are also open to suggestions for other relevant projects. Please email us at projects[@]heritedge.org to discuss.
(Starting May 2026) Colonial newspapers in the Caribbean of the late 18th and 19th centuries are replete with advertisements about theaters and spectacles. Based on digitized newspapers from Barbados, volunteers & interns are sought to help with various tasks such as developing a digital collection of such advertisements; extracting information about plays, actors, and theatrical groups; and locating theatrical plays mentioned in the newspapers to extant archival and library collections.
Most enslaved people in the Caribbean have left no personal accounts or narratives. There are, however, such first-person voices embedded in colonial newspapers or travelogues. How can we subvert such colonial records to locate silenced voices? Volunteers & interns are sought to help locate these voices.
Colonial newspapers underpinned the system of slavery. They are replete with information that was meant to persecute and dehumanize enslaved people. Can such information be a springboard for writing about the lives of enslaved people? Volunteers and interns are sought to develop such possibilities.
Human activities have shaped and affected nature. The impact of the Anthropocene, particularly through imperial expansion and colonialism, on plants and animals has been profound and altering. What stories can we tell if we center the perspective of animals and plants? Volunteers and interns are sought to help locate more-than-human stories.