Placing Unfree Labour

A seminar with Kendra Strauss - Slavery Old and New: Labour Exploitation Through the Ages and Around the Globe seminar series

Join us for a video-conference with Kendra Strauss, Simon Fraser University, hosted by the Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law, the Institute for Comparative Law, and the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas.

A light lunch will be served: kindly RSVP to oppenheimer [at] mcgill.ca.

Abstract

This talk will explore how feminist and legal geographical approaches to unfree labour – in particular forced labour and trafficking – unsettle and potentially enrich legal analyses of regulatory regimes. In it, Kendra Strauss will explore two dimensions of unfreedom in contemporary labour markets that have received less attention than issues of implementation and enforcement.

First, she will examine how jurisdiction constructs, and is produced by, socio-spatial processes that are more-than-territorial, and which normatively shape what counts as work and who counts as a worker. Second, she will apply these insights to an examination of how climate change, as a set of processes that overflow state boundaries and produce localized, material vulnerabilities to forced labour and trafficking, might problematize approaches that posit de-territorialization as the solution to jurisdictional conundrums.

Kendra Strauss is Associate Member of the Simon Fraser University Department of Geography and Assistant Professor at the Labour Studies Program & The Morgan Centre for Labour Research. Her work focuses on occupational pensions; precarious work, migration and unfree labour; and on theorizing the relationships between production and social reproduction in contemporary capitalist economies.