Elena Shih
Biographic Data
| ID | 255653 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elena Shih |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elena |
| FAMILY NAME | Shih |
| SIGNATURE | SHIH E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6982-9082 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 46 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Response to Samantha Majic’s Review of Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue
Introduction: The enduring impact of Kamala Kempadoo
Global sex work research collaborations before the anti-trafficking industry: A conversation with Kamala Kempadoo and Amalia Cabezas
The special issue co-editors (Lyndsey Beutin, April Petillo, and Elena Shih) sat down with Kamala Kempadoo and long-time collaborator Amalia Cabezas on July 26, 2024, over Zoom to hear about what sex work research was like before the anti-trafficking framework cannibalized the sex workers' rights movement
Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue
Sex worker rescue programs have become a core focus of the global movement to combat human trafficking. While these rehabilitation programs promise freedom from enslavement and redemptive wages for former sex workers, such organizations actually propagate a moral economy of low‐wage women’s work that obfuscates relations of race, gender, national power, and inequality. Manufacturing Freedom is an ethnographic exploration of two American organizat…
White Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking
This chapter explores the contemporary experience of Jamaican sex workers against two visions of slavery’s wrong. It argues that because it reads contract as freedom, current anti- traffi cking discourse is forced to deny the ethnographic realities of phenomena it dubs “modern slavery.” A focus on what it means to live in the wake of racial slavery affords a more useful lens through which to analyze the restraints on freedom experienced by Jamaic…
White Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking
The Double-Edged Sword of Health and Safety: Covid-19 and the Policing and Exclusion of Migrant Asian Massage Workers in North America
Migrant Asian massage workers in North America first experienced the impacts of COVID-19 in the final weeks of January 2020, when business dropped drastically due to widespread xenophobic fears that the virus was concentrated in Chinese diasporic communities. The sustained economic devastation, which began at least 8 weeks prior to the first social distancing and shelter in place orders issued in the U.S. and Canada, has been further complicated …
The New Virtual Crackdown on Sex Workers’ Rights: Perspectives from the United States
On 11 April 2018, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) was signed into law in the United States. FOSTA introduced new provisions to amend the Communications Act of 1934 so that websites can be prosecuted if they engage ‘in the promotion or facilitation of prostitution’ or ‘facilitate traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims.’ While supporters of the law claim that its aim is to target human tra…
Occupational Hazards: Sex, Business, and HIV in Post-Mao China
Duplicitous Freedom: Moral and Material Care Work in Anti-Trafficking Rescue and Rehabilitation
Contemporary anti-trafficking narratives exemplify the centrality of family unaccountability as one of the root causes of sex trafficking. Suggesting that human trafficking can be explained by bad family values, or cultural norms that consider girl children to be disposable, facilitates the heroic, paternalist, and 'caring' interventions that have now been well-documented by activists and scholars of trafficking. Focusing on the family, these ref…
Freedom Markets: Consumption and Commerce across Human-Trafficking Rescue in Thailand
This article is interested in why and how Thailand functions as a pivotal destination for US human-trafficking rescue projects, and it situates transnational antitrafficking endeavors within Thai political and economic history. Based on ethnographic participant observation of the global antitrafficking movement in Thailand, China, and the United States between 2008 and 2014, this article juxtaposes two distinct tourist encounters: a human-traffic…
Not in My 'Backyard Abolitionism: Vigilante Rescue against American Sex Trafficking
In 2008, the San Francisco-based antitrafficking nonprofit organization Not for Sale launched a campaign advocating 'backyard abolitionism,' training American citizens to seek out and identify victims of human trafficking as part of their everyday activities. Based on two years of ethnographic participant observation with two evangelical Christian human trafficking outreach projects in Southern California, this article examines the processes of w…
Prostitution and Sex Work
Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States
The Erotics of Authenticity: Sex Trafficking and "Reality Tourism" in Thailand
In this article, our ethnographic focus is a human trafficking “reality tour” of Thailand, a one-week tour of purported trafficking-related sites that the authors jointly attended. This tour was part of a growing number of trips around the world that offer alternatives to mass tourism, taking issues of social justice and humanitarian intervention as their focal orientation. As scholars with an interest in trafficking, labor exploitation, and sex …
Health and Rights at the Margins: Human trafficking and HIV/Aids amongst Jingpo ethnic communities in Ruili City, China
In 2007, China and Myanmar signed their first Bilateral Memorandum of Understanding on human trafficking. The two countries cemented this agreement with the unveiling of the first Border Liaison Office in Ruili City, located in China’s southwestern Yunnan Province — one of the primary border crossing points between China and Myanmar. The government focus on human trafficking on this border intersects with decades of struggles to curb the border’s…
Not in My 'Backyard Abolitionism: Vigilante Rescue against American Sex Trafficking
In 2008, the San Francisco-based antitrafficking nonprofit organization Not for Sale launched a campaign advocating 'backyard abolitionism,' training American citizens to seek out and identify victims of human trafficking as part of their everyday activities. Based on two years of ethnographic participant observation with two evangelical Christian human trafficking outreach projects in Southern California, this article examines the processes of w…
The Erotics of Authenticity: Sex Trafficking and "Reality Tourism" in Thailand
In this article, our ethnographic focus is a human trafficking “reality tour” of Thailand, a one-week tour of purported trafficking-related sites that the authors jointly attended. This tour was part of a growing number of trips around the world that offer alternatives to mass tourism, taking issues of social justice and humanitarian intervention as their focal orientation. As scholars with an interest in trafficking, labor exploitation, and sex …
Duplicitous Freedom: Moral and Material Care Work in Anti-Trafficking Rescue and Rehabilitation
Contemporary anti-trafficking narratives exemplify the centrality of family unaccountability as one of the root causes of sex trafficking. Suggesting that human trafficking can be explained by bad family values, or cultural norms that consider girl children to be disposable, facilitates the heroic, paternalist, and 'caring' interventions that have now been well-documented by activists and scholars of trafficking. Focusing on the family, these ref…
Freedom Markets: Consumption and Commerce across Human-Trafficking Rescue in Thailand
This article is interested in why and how Thailand functions as a pivotal destination for US human-trafficking rescue projects, and it situates transnational antitrafficking endeavors within Thai political and economic history. Based on ethnographic participant observation of the global antitrafficking movement in Thailand, China, and the United States between 2008 and 2014, this article juxtaposes two distinct tourist encounters: a human-traffic…
The Double-Edged Sword of Health and Safety: Covid-19 and the Policing and Exclusion of Migrant Asian Massage Workers in North America
Migrant Asian massage workers in North America first experienced the impacts of COVID-19 in the final weeks of January 2020, when business dropped drastically due to widespread xenophobic fears that the virus was concentrated in Chinese diasporic communities. The sustained economic devastation, which began at least 8 weeks prior to the first social distancing and shelter in place orders issued in the U.S. and Canada, has been further complicated …
The New Virtual Crackdown on Sex Workers’ Rights: Perspectives from the United States
On 11 April 2018, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) was signed into law in the United States. FOSTA introduced new provisions to amend the Communications Act of 1934 so that websites can be prosecuted if they engage ‘in the promotion or facilitation of prostitution’ or ‘facilitate traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims.’ While supporters of the law claim that its aim is to target human tra…
Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States
Health and Rights at the Margins: Human trafficking and HIV/Aids amongst Jingpo ethnic communities in Ruili City, China
In 2007, China and Myanmar signed their first Bilateral Memorandum of Understanding on human trafficking. The two countries cemented this agreement with the unveiling of the first Border Liaison Office in Ruili City, located in China’s southwestern Yunnan Province — one of the primary border crossing points between China and Myanmar. The government focus on human trafficking on this border intersects with decades of struggles to curb the border’s…
Health and Rights at the Margins: Human trafficking and HIV/Aids amongst Jingpo ethnic communities in Ruili City, China
In 2007, China and Myanmar signed their first Bilateral Memorandum of Understanding on human trafficking. The two countries cemented this agreement with the unveiling of the first Border Liaison Office in Ruili City, located in China’s southwestern Yunnan Province — one of the primary border crossing points between China and Myanmar. The government focus on human trafficking on this border intersects with decades of struggles to curb the border’s…
The Erotics of Authenticity: Sex Trafficking and "Reality Tourism" in Thailand
In this article, our ethnographic focus is a human trafficking “reality tour” of Thailand, a one-week tour of purported trafficking-related sites that the authors jointly attended. This tour was part of a growing number of trips around the world that offer alternatives to mass tourism, taking issues of social justice and humanitarian intervention as their focal orientation. As scholars with an interest in trafficking, labor exploitation, and sex …
Prostitution and Sex Work
Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States
Not in My 'Backyard Abolitionism: Vigilante Rescue against American Sex Trafficking
In 2008, the San Francisco-based antitrafficking nonprofit organization Not for Sale launched a campaign advocating 'backyard abolitionism,' training American citizens to seek out and identify victims of human trafficking as part of their everyday activities. Based on two years of ethnographic participant observation with two evangelical Christian human trafficking outreach projects in Southern California, this article examines the processes of w…
Freedom Markets: Consumption and Commerce across Human-Trafficking Rescue in Thailand
This article is interested in why and how Thailand functions as a pivotal destination for US human-trafficking rescue projects, and it situates transnational antitrafficking endeavors within Thai political and economic history. Based on ethnographic participant observation of the global antitrafficking movement in Thailand, China, and the United States between 2008 and 2014, this article juxtaposes two distinct tourist encounters: a human-traffic…
Occupational Hazards: Sex, Business, and HIV in Post-Mao China
Duplicitous Freedom: Moral and Material Care Work in Anti-Trafficking Rescue and Rehabilitation
Contemporary anti-trafficking narratives exemplify the centrality of family unaccountability as one of the root causes of sex trafficking. Suggesting that human trafficking can be explained by bad family values, or cultural norms that consider girl children to be disposable, facilitates the heroic, paternalist, and 'caring' interventions that have now been well-documented by activists and scholars of trafficking. Focusing on the family, these ref…
The New Virtual Crackdown on Sex Workers’ Rights: Perspectives from the United States
On 11 April 2018, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) was signed into law in the United States. FOSTA introduced new provisions to amend the Communications Act of 1934 so that websites can be prosecuted if they engage ‘in the promotion or facilitation of prostitution’ or ‘facilitate traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims.’ While supporters of the law claim that its aim is to target human tra…
The Double-Edged Sword of Health and Safety: Covid-19 and the Policing and Exclusion of Migrant Asian Massage Workers in North America
Migrant Asian massage workers in North America first experienced the impacts of COVID-19 in the final weeks of January 2020, when business dropped drastically due to widespread xenophobic fears that the virus was concentrated in Chinese diasporic communities. The sustained economic devastation, which began at least 8 weeks prior to the first social distancing and shelter in place orders issued in the U.S. and Canada, has been further complicated …
White Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking
This chapter explores the contemporary experience of Jamaican sex workers against two visions of slavery’s wrong. It argues that because it reads contract as freedom, current anti- traffi cking discourse is forced to deny the ethnographic realities of phenomena it dubs “modern slavery.” A focus on what it means to live in the wake of racial slavery affords a more useful lens through which to analyze the restraints on freedom experienced by Jamaic…
White Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking
Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue
Sex worker rescue programs have become a core focus of the global movement to combat human trafficking. While these rehabilitation programs promise freedom from enslavement and redemptive wages for former sex workers, such organizations actually propagate a moral economy of low‐wage women’s work that obfuscates relations of race, gender, national power, and inequality. Manufacturing Freedom is an ethnographic exploration of two American organizat…
Introduction: The enduring impact of Kamala Kempadoo
Global sex work research collaborations before the anti-trafficking industry: A conversation with Kamala Kempadoo and Amalia Cabezas
The special issue co-editors (Lyndsey Beutin, April Petillo, and Elena Shih) sat down with Kamala Kempadoo and long-time collaborator Amalia Cabezas on July 26, 2024, over Zoom to hear about what sex work research was like before the anti-trafficking framework cannibalized the sex workers' rights movement
Response to Samantha Majic’s Review of Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue
Sex work and related issues (13 works) · Political science (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Criminology (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Human trafficking (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Sex work (5 works) · HIV, Drug Use, Sexual Risk (4 works)