Placing Unfree Labour

Conférence avec Kendra Strauss sur l'esclavage et l'exploitation à travers les âges

Conférence avec Kendra Strauss, Simon Fraser University, organisée par la Chaire Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer en droit public international, l'Institut de droit comparé de McGill, et le Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas.

Un léger déjeuner sera servi: prière de confirmer sa présence en écrivant à oppenheimer [at] mcgill.ca.

Résumé (en anglais seulement)

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.