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Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States Duke University Press 2014
What are the challenges to rebuilding a life after being trafficked into forced labor? Anthropologist Denise Brennan spent nearly ten years following the resettlement of men and women who were trafficked to the United States. Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States is an account of their struggles in and after trafficking. While many believe trafficking happens only in the sex trade, Brennan shows that across low-wage labor sectors—in fields, factories, and homes— widespread exploitation can lead to and conceal forced labor. Brennan contends that today's punitive immigration policies undermine efforts to fight trafficking. Exploited workers stay silent about abuse for fear of arrest and deportation. Life Interrupted is a riveting account of life in and after trafficking and a forceful call for meaningful immigration and labor reform.
Excerpts:
Reviews:
International Journal of Refugee Law
Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books
Royal Anthropological Institute
International Migration Review
Journal of Anthropological Research
Medical Anthropology Quarterly
Interviews:
New Books Network: New Books in Gender Studies
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What's Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic
What's Love Got to Do with It? follows the lives of resourceful Dominican and Haitian women who capitalize on the sex-tourist boom to meet, feign love, marry, and move overseas with foreign men. They use the local sex-tourist business as a stepping stone to international migration.
Reviews (selected):
Journal of Anthropological Research
National Women's Studies Association Journal
GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
International Feminist Journal of Politics
IN PROGRESS
The Border Is Everywhere: Policing Everyday Life in An Era of Deportation
The Border Is Everywhere: Policing Everyday Life in An Era of Mass Deportation examines how undocumented migrants manage the violent possibility of being forcibly removed from the United States with the banal tasks of their daily lives. The book draws from field research within the "100-Mile Border Zone" (an enhanced immigration enforcement zone) along both the U.S. southern and northern borders, as well as within migrant communities in the U.S. interior. In this way, the book calls attention to how border policing happens far from any actual border.
Life Amidst Fire: Climate Change, Migration, and Work
I have just begun field research with migrant workers who work in fire evacuation zones as well as with migrant “disaster workers” who clean up after extreme weather events. This new book, Life Amidst Fire: Climate Change, Migration, and Work, asks what “counts” as trafficking when climate-related disasters become regular events? It questions whether existing legal frameworks that define trafficking as laboring under “force, fraud, or coercion” offer sufficient protections on a rapidly heating planet. Relatedly, as people are forced to migrate because of lack and work and food insecurity in places wracked by climate disasters, what “counts” as a basis for asylum?