Presented by the UB Humanities Institute in collaboration with the UB Distinguished Visiting Scholars Program with the UB departments of Sociology and Global Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Elena Shih will give a talk on her book Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue (University of California Press, 2023).

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.

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: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue (University of California Press), and White Supremacy, Colonialism, and the Racism of Anti-Trafficking (Routledge). Shih serves on the editorial boards for The Anti-Trafficking Review, a peer-reviewed journal of the Global Alliance to Combat Traffic in Women, Gender and Society, and openDemocracy’s Beyond Trafficking and Slavery op-ed platform. 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 PhD in Sociology from UCLA, and a BA in Asian Studies from Pomona College.

This event is held in conjunction with the HI/DVS Film Series screening of Fly in Power the evening prior. Click here for info about the free and open to the public screening.