Local Lectures

Five College Women's Studies Research Center
Spring 2008 Events

FCWSRC events are free and open to the public. No preregistration is required. Regular talks are held on Mondays and Thursdays from 4:00-5:30pm. Unless otherwise noted, all events take place at the Center at 83 College Street on the Mount Holyoke campus.
For more information, see www.fivecolleges.edu/sites/fcwsrc or tele 413-538-2275.

Thursday, April 3 at 4pm
Gyoung Sun Jang
Research Associate, Clark University
De/Gendering Sex Trafficking: Discursive Strategies in Transnational Anti-sex Trafficking Movements
Jang’s study probes discourses of anti-sex trafficking movements deployed in the course of shaping inter-state trafficking conventions from 1904 to 2000. She examines the discourses of ‘child prostitution’ and ‘public health’ as repeating themes in the history of these movements. Jang also discusses these discourses in relation to the modernization projects of both imperial and post-colonial states. In contrast to the currently polarized analyses of sex trafficking and prostitution in feminist scholarship, this position provides a new way to historicize transnational campaigns with a different set of analytical questions and frameworks.

Monday, April 7 at 4pm
Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez
Ford Associate, University of Manchester
Transnational Migration, Affective Labor and Precariousness: On Domestic and Care Workers' Rights
A wide range of research indicates that domestic and care work in private households is now the largest employment sector for migrant women entering the European Union (Anderson and Phizacklea 1997). Although the relationship between paid domestic and care workers and their employers tends to be widely acknowledged in social science literature, this relationship has rarely been explored in detail on the interpersonal level of transcultural encounters between employers and employees in private households. How do EU migration policies constrain the social mobility of migrant women? How does paid domestic and care work structure interpersonal relationships between those who pay for and those employed to do this work in private households?