Dear Colleagues, It is our pleasure to announce the school and conference "Aspects of higher representation theory: quantum groups and categorification” which will take place at the U-residence (campus of VUB/ULB in Brussels) from January 21 until January 25. The goal of this event is to connect different communities around 'Higher representation theory' in the broad sense (tensor categories and module categories, 2-categories, categorification, …) The first two days (Monday-Tuesday) of the event is a “school” consisting of 3 mini-courses that will introduce young participants and other interested researchers to the topics of the conference. During these days we also plan a poster session and short talks, to allow young researchers to communicate their results. The next three days (Wednesday-Thursday-Friday) of the event is a conference, with lectures of the invited speakers in the morning and contributed talks in the afternoon. Everyone is warmly invited to participate at both or one of these events. More information and a registration form can be found at the following website: http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~hopfalgb/Aspects The deadline for registration is November 1, 2018. Feel free to forward this information to anyone who might be interested. Best wishes, The organizers Kenny De Commer Pedro Vaz Joost Vercruysse [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]