"Whose Exploitation Counts? Trafficking Survivors As Exceptions in An Era of Mass Deportation"

Denise Brennan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Georgetown University, and Faculty Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Gender+ Justice Initiative. Brennan’s scholarship focuses on trafficking, sex work, policing, migration, and women’s labor. Brennan’s most recent book follows the lives of the first survivors of trafficking to the United States. Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States (2014) examines the connection between undocumented status and exploitation, and how individuals who endured severe abuse rebuild their lives. Brennan is also the author of What's Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (2004), which explores how Dominican women strategically use the sex sector to meet tourists and use to their own advantage relationships with men who have come to take advantage of them, in some cases legally migrating off the island through marriage. Brennan’s current book project, Undocumented: Criminalizing Everyday Life in the United States, explores how 11 million undocumented individuals without immigration protections live everyday with the threat of deportation. It examines how they navigate state surveillance, racial profiling, and the violent possibility of being forcibly removed from their family in their daily lives. The book draws from field research inside the "100-Mile Border Zone" as well as migrant communities in the U.S. interior.

This speaker series is co-sponsored by the KU Center for Migration Research and media-sponsored by Kansas Public Radio.

Migration Stories: Denise Brennan