The Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women presents the Annual Elizabeth Munves Sherman ’77, P’06, P’09 Lecture in Gender and Sexuality Studies featuring Elena Shih, Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies at Brown University.

In recent years, the anti-trafficking movement has honed in on Asian massage work as a site of human trafficking, endorsing new forms of surveillance and policing on Asian migrant women workers. Drawing on community based ethnographic fieldwork and oral histories with sex worker rights groups in the US and Asia, this talk thinks through how such anti-trafficking endeavors police racialized poverty. In light of the one year remembrance of the shootings at three massage businesses in Atlanta in 2021, this talk also discusses some of the ways that communities and grassroots activists have come together to mourn, organize, and demand an end to systemic violence.

Professor Shih’s book project, “Manufacturing Freedom: Trafficking Rescue, Rehabilitation, and the Slave Free Good” (under contract with University of California Press), is a global ethnography of the transnational social movement to combat human trafficking in China, Thailand, and the United States. Shih teaches courses on human trafficking, labor migration and sex work, social enterprise, East and Southeast Asian borderlands, critical humanitarianism studies, and ethnographic methods.

Professor Elena Shih is also a 2021-22 member of the Pembroke Center’s Feminist Theory Archive Advisory Committee.

About the Annual Elizabeth Munves Sherman ’77, P’06, P’09 Lecture

Each year, the Pembroke Center hosts the Elizabeth Munves Sherman ’77, P’06, P’09 Lecture in Gender and Sexuality Studies, featuring a distinguished Brown faculty member. Lecturers work in a wide range of disciplines, and present research that considers the impact of gender and sexuality across fields.

The Pembroke Center’s 40th Anniversary

The 2021-22 academic year marks the 40th anniversary of the Pembroke Center. The center was founded in 1981, a decade after Pembroke College—the coordinate women’s college of Brown University—merged fully with the men’s college. As the greater community honors 130 years of women at Brown, the Pembroke Center is delighted to celebrate its history of cultivating interdisciplinary work on gender and sexuality through its research, teaching, archival and community-building programs.