When: 16.30 GMT Wednesday March 13, 2024
Who: Professor Simon Green, University of Hull
Simon Green is Professor of Criminology and Victimology at the University of Hull. Currently Principal Investigator for two projects funded by the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner (looking at domestic abuse and violence reduction), Simon is particularly interested in the victims of modern slavery and how they are identified, protected and supported.
Since the turn of the millennium, there has been a concerted international response to the exploitation of human beings. National and international awareness campaigns about the extent of various forms of exploitative practices have driven law enforcement, victim support and human rights strategies to combat them. Despite this progress the language, definition and explanation for these exploitative behaviours remains contested, unclear and under-theorised. This contestation manifests itself in a fault line between the framing of the problem on the one hand as interpersonal victimisation and criminal justice and on the other, as political human rights, migration and global economic forces. This lecture seeks to resolve these conceptual and practical limitations, and in doing so reconfigure the understanding and response to all forms of exploitation by developing a clear definition that is philosophically and theoretically grounded. The purpose of this reconceptualisation is to provide a governing explanation for the type of injustice that sits at the heart of all forms of modern slavery.
When: 16.30 BST Wednesday April 17, 2024
Who: Professor Laura Murphy, Sheffield Hallam University
Laura Murphy is Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice, at Sheffield Hallam University. She has consulted for the World Health Organization, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Office of Victims of Crime, and the National Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance Center, as well as other government agencies, workers unions, investor groups, law firms, and advocacy groups. This includes providing expert testimony and evidence on the current crisis in the Uyghur Region to the U.S., U.K., E.U., and Australian governments and private briefings to government agencies, advocacy groups, law firms, and others interested in the issue globally.
The Uyghur Region of China (officially known as Xinjiang, known by many of its Indigenous people as East Turkestan) has been at the centre of a strategic program of state-sponsored forced labour promulgated by the People’s Republic of China [PRC]. The nearly ubiquitous forced labour in the region affects global supply chains from apparel to renewable energy, plastics to electronics, and raw materials to automobiles. This talk will discuss why the government of the PRC is expending so many resources on this program of oppression, on the ways the government manufactures vulnerability among its Indigenous citizens as justification for its actions, and on the discourses of ‘urgency’ and ‘complexity’ that international corporations use as shelter for their complicity.
When: 16.30 BST Wednesday May 15, 2024
Who: Professor Emily West, University of Reading
Emily West is Chair of the British American Nineteenth Century Historians and Research Division Lead for the History Department at the University of Reading. She is interested in issues of race and gender in American history, and in particular on slavery in the southern states of the U.S.A. Alongside researching the lives of enslaved women and their relationships with their enslaved spouses, she also looks at family life under enslavement, affective ties between enslaved people and free people of colour, and infant and child feeding.
This talk will develop some themes from the speaker’s current book project on the labour of care in the living quarters in the antebellum U.S. South especially the labour associated with feeding enslaved people. Enslavers wanted the enslaved to eat with maximum efficiency at minimal cost, so they attempted to impose regimented, institutional style feeding regimes on their plantations and farms. Most of this labour fell upon enslaved women, for whom feeding has a duality as a form of gendered exploitation, but also a means by which women found pleasure, nurture, and empowerment through the cooking, preparation, and consumption of food. Routinely tasked with the feeding of infant and babies, which sometimes involved the practice of wet-nursing, enslaved women also cooked for and fed older children and other adults throughout the working day and sometimes in the evenings as well. These women performed a vital role but have yet to be centred in our analysis of slavery’s machinations and enslavers’ drive for efficiencies.