Seminar: The Trauma of Exploitation
Professor Francis Collins, University of Waikato
Wednesday 27 April 2022, 4-5pm
St David Seminar Room A, St David Complex, University of Otago, Dunedin
This talk advances a focus on emotions as a key dimension of the actualisation of workplace exploitation experienced by temporary migrants. In doing so, it extends understandings of forced labour, unfreedom and migration and their concern for the operation of coercion in employment relations.
In advancing this emotional account, the talk draws on interviews with people holding work and study visas who have experienced workplace exploitation in Aotearoa New Zealand, a context where the rapid growth in temporary migration has been associated with growing evidence of labour market abuse. The talk will address three key emotional dimensions of workplace exploitation: inducement, entrapment, and exploitation. We demonstrate how unfreedom is felt in the lives of temporary migrants and point towards the need to rethink both scholarly accounts of forced labour and policy responses to the workplace exploitation of temporary migrants.
This talk is co-hosted by the Centre for Global Migrations and Sociology, Gender Studies and Criminology at the University of Otago.
Speaker Details:
Professor Francis Collins is Professor Geography and Director of Te Ngira: Institute for Population Research at the University of Waikato. The paper he is presenting is co-authored with Christina Stringer, Associate Professor of International Business and Director of the Centre for Research on Modern Slavery at the University of Auckland Business School.
