Elena Shih is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University and Faculty Fellow at Brown's Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. During Fall 2016, Shih holds a visiting faculty fellowship at Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.

 

Shih's book manuscript in progress, "Fair Trade Freedom: Moral and Political Economies of Human Trafficking Rescue in China, Thailand and the U.S.," is a multi-sited and global ethnography based off 40 months of fieldwork on efforts to combat human trafficking in Beijing, Bangkok and Los Angeles. Drawing on fieldwork as a participant action researcher with faith-based and secular social movement organizations--ranging from grassroots evangelical Christian missionary projects, to sex worker rights cooperatives, to the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking--her dissertation explores the mobilization of rights and morality in between the state and the market in the contemporary movement against human trafficking.

 

This work is inspired by transnational feminist and critical race theories, and brings these frameworks to bear on political and economic sociology. Concerned with hierarchies of race, class, and gendered inequality between social movement actors in the Global North and their alleged subjects in the Global South, the dissertation argues that despite obvious differences across political economic regimes and ideological orientations of anti-trafficking movement organizations, contemporary anti-trafficking efforts reproduce women's global subordination at both the discursive and labor process levels. This research is pivotal for understanding how transnational social movements are successful according to their stated objectives and for people they intend to serve.

 

Shih earned a PhD in Sociology from UCLA and a BA in Asian Studies and Women's Studies from Pomona College. She is a former Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown's Watson Institute for International Studies; and serves on the editorial board for the Anti-Trafficking Review, a peer-reviewed journal based out of the Global Alliance Against the Traffic in Women, and the Beyond Trafficking and Slavery initiative through opendemocracy.net.