Please join us for what promises to be a remarkable event. All are welcome!
Monday, March 31st
4 pm. Class of 1947 Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library
Joel Quirk, Department of Political Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, author of Unfinished Business: A Comparative Survey of Historical and Contemporary Slavery (2009) and The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to HumanTrafficking (2011) will give a talk entitled:
Competing Visions: Human Trafficking versus Forced Labour
This talk evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of human
trafficking as a framework for conceptualizing – and successfully combating – various forms of human bondage as they exist today. While human
trafficking is now firmly embedded at both an institutional and popular level, a growing number of critics have called into question the conception and execution of recent anti-
trafficking campaigns. Over the last decade, many actors and institutions have come to describe a huge variety of problems as forms of
trafficking, including cases of servile marriage, hereditary bondage, and wartime enslavement. While there are some political and rhetorical advantages to employing a
trafficking framework, this talk demonstrates that an expansive “catch-all” approach remains subject to a host of analytical complications and practical limitations.
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Sponsored by the American Studies Program, the Department of History, the Humanities Institute and the Unfree Labor Working Group
Joel Quirk is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies, University of the Witwatersrand. His research primarily focuses upon the relationship between the global history of slavery and abolition and contemporary forms of human bondage.Joel is the author of Unfinished Business: A Comparative Survey of Historical and Contemporary Slavery (2009) and The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking (2011), and co-editor of Slavery, Memory and Identity (2012), Slavery, Migration and Contemporary Bondage in Africa (2013), and Before the Rise of the West (2014). He is also a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project, where he serves as Rapporteur.