Episode 3 of “Slavery and Its Legacies” with Elena Shih

In this episode Thomas Thurston spoke with Elena Shih, an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University and a visiting fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center, about her work on human trafficking rescue efforts and the politics of labor, gender, and sexuality. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in China, Thailand, and the United States, Professor Shih argues that rescue programs create a transnational moral economy of low-wage women’s work, replacing traditional wage labor with affective commitments between First World rescuers and their “victims”.