An Abolitionist Industrial Complex: Patterns of anti-trafficking/anti-slavery policy and practice in the 21st century.

Rationale: The project will bring together scholars from a range of disciplinary (and cross-disciplinary) backgrounds to develop a methodological approach for tracing the contours of the global anti-trafficking / anti-slavery field. Anti-trafficking / anti-slavery policy and practice have been expanding over the last two decades but critical analysis has often been limited to particular actors (or groups of actors). Documentation and analysis of the field as a whole is therefore necessary. The participants and fellows, all of whom have produced scholarly work on anti-trafficking and/or anti-slavery, therefore seek to develop an interdisciplinary methodological approach for mapping the anti-trafficking / anti-slavery field. 

Project aims: through the seminar series, the project will be informed by and engage with scholars and practitioners working on the socio-political economies of activism, advocacy and (public and private) policy in other issue areas. It will result in a grant proposal to apply the methodology in developing an analytical resource which maps the anti-trafficking / anti-slavery field.