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The UCLA Transnational Gender and Labor Working Group,* launched by sociologist Jennifer Chun, associate director of the Institute for Research on Labor Employment and chair of the International Development Studies program at the UCLA International Institute, invites you to talk by Elena Shih on her new book, "Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rebha and the Racial Wages of Rescue" (UC Press, 2023).

This talk is held in conjunction with a film screening of "Fly in Power" on Friday, October 20 in UCLA Melnitz Hall, followed by a Q&A with Elena Shih.

About the book
Sex worker rescue programs have become a core focus of the global movement to combat human trafficking. While these rehabilitation programs promise freedom from enslavement and redemptive wages for former sex workers, such organizations actually propagate a moral economy of low‑wage women’s work that obfuscates relations of race, gender, national power, and inequality. "Manufacturing Freedom" is an ethnographic exploration of two American organizations that offer vocational training in jewelry production to women migrants in China and Thailand as a path out of sex work. In this innovative study, Elena Shih argues that anti‑trafficking rescue and rehabilitation projects profit off persistent labor abuse of women workers and imagined but savvily marketed narratives of redemption.

About the author
Elena Shih is Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, where she directs a human trafficking research cluster through the Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Shih is the author of two books: "Manufacturing Freedom: and "White Supremacy, Colonialism, and the Racism of Anti-Trafficking" (Routledge, 2023; Kamala Kempadoo, co-editor).

Shih serves on the editorial boards for The Anti-Trafficking Review, a peer-reviewed journal of the Global Alliance to Combat Traffic in Women, and openDemocracy’s Beyond Trafficking and Slavery op-ed platform. In 2018 Shih was appointed to the Rhode Island State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Recent op-eds about her research and organizing as a core collective member of Red Canary Song appear in the New York Times and Providence Journal. She earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA, and a B.A. in Asian Studies from Pomona College.

Please RVSP to reserve a seat and secure lunch.

*The UCLA Transnational Gender and Labor Working Group brings together faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students, community-based organizers and researchers at UCLA to advance the interdisciplinary study of gender, labor, collective organizing and global capitalism.

Download file: Elena-Shih-Book-Talk_updated_092323-a0-u3z.pdf

Sponsor(s): UCLA International Institute, UCLA Center for the Study of Women, UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, Anthropology, Department of Sociology