Call for Papers on trafficking

CALL FOR PAPERS

"Anti-Trafficking, Human Rights, and Social Justice"
Special issue for Wagadu, Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies. SUNY Cortland.

This special issue of Wagadu, Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies aims to explore the life experiences, agency, and human rights of the women who are involved in a variety of activities that are characterized as "trafficked" terrains in a deterritorialized and reterritorialized world, in order to shed light on the complicated processes in which anti-trafficking, human rights and social justice are intersected.

While previous studies have highlighted popular discourses, national and international policies, and the victimization and struggles of the trafficked women, few studies have centered on the stories of the migrant subjects themselves to offer a critical reading of the recent competing definitions of trafficking and the complex ways in which the intertwined configurations of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality complicate the contemporary hegemonic discourse on trafficking.

This special issue will fill this lacuna through theorizing and conceptualizing the intersecting discourses on anti-trafficking, human rights, and social justice from the perspectives of the transnational migrant populations. Specifically, this issue will include articles that will rearticulate the trafficking discourses away from the state control of immigration and the global policing of borders, and reassert the social justice and the needs, agency, and human rights of migrant and working communities.

Some of the topics of investigation may include: a critical analysis of the conflation of trafficking with sex work in international and national discourses and its effects on migrant women; effects on the vulnerable population as a result of the anti-prostitution policy and a denial of human rights of sex workers; suggestions of more effective anti-trafficking interventions that will ameliorate social justice and human rights of the migrant populations; the sociocultural effects on the migrant population as a result of the global and national laws against trafficking, immigration and smuggling; the debate between the recognition of women's human rights to migrate and work as sex workers and the anti-trafficking policy that classifies sex workers as trafficked victims and slaves; a critical analysis of the global anti-trafficking policy and the root causes for the undocumented migration and employment; the relationship between the human rights of the vulnerable population and the state approaches to trafficking; the effects upon the migrant population as a result of the ways in which the state and international policies define "trafficked persons" and "undocumented migrants." the complicated intersections of forced and voluntary labor and migrations at the national and international level.

Please send abstracts (75 words) in English and complete essays (approximately 5,500-7,500 words) by August 1, 2006. Submissions should be sent electronically in MLA or APA format to mailto:zhengt@cortland.edu
TiantianZheng
Sociology/Anthropology
State University of New York
College at Cortland P.O. Box 2000
Cortland, NY 13045
Office phone number: 607-753-2478
Fax: 607-753-5973
Email: zhengt@cortland.edu