State-Led Assault on Migrants and Sex Workers A repressive immigration regime premised on raids, arrests, and deportations has profoundly shaped US antitrafficking policy. Only a small number—under 4,000—of exploited migrants have been assisted by antitrafficking policies. Meanwhile, vast numbers of migrant workers labor unprotected and live in fear of detection and deportation. Under the rubric … Read more
Introduced by the Wham-O® company in 1958, the Hula-hoop® filled the playtime of millions of mid-twentieth-century American children who tried to get the hoop rolling nearly effortlessly around their waists using a Hawai’ian-style hip swing (and sometimes giving up on that and instead jumping through it, rolling it, and using it for modified forms of … Read more
During the past two years, I have been engaged in a multidisciplinary ethnographic project funded under the Ford Foundation initiative, “Youth Sexuality, Health, and Rights in the United States.” The project examines the structural climate of youth sexuality and sexual health through a political economic lens, focusing specifically on three different modalities of sexual commerce … Read more
I take the term “neoliberalism” as a useful reference to social, cultural, and political shifts that have occurred in the wake of economic globalization, particularly the shift of industrial production from the neocolonial metropole to the formerly colonized world that occurred during the 1970s and 1980s. In the United States, I see the shift as … Read more
Article note. The term “neoliberalism” has come to mark an era. In its initial instantiations, this term described a critique of a set of economic policies that included privatization and lowering tariffs pertaining to imports and exports of raw materials and retail goods. The latter set of policies, also known as “free trade” agreements, drove … Read more
My reflections on this theme are based on the experiences of Argentina. In some aspects, but not all, these reflections also refer to Latin America as a region. In Latin America, social movements, political leaders, and governments are increasingly framing issues and political responses at a regional (Latin American) level. Regional languages, political initiatives, as … Read more
In my work, I draw from Michel Foucault’s formulations of biopower to think about the organization and management of life, health, illness, and death, especially as those forces instantiate through gender/race/sexuality. Here, I will outline some of the ways that a biopower framework has been useful for me. I will also think about ways that … Read more
Neoliberalism is perhaps now most widely understood within critical interdisciplinary studies in terms of the permeation of the logic of the free market throughout all realms of social and subjective life. Viewed as both: (1) a project instituting market-based norms of practice across the spheres of politics, economics, and culture, the boundaries between which have … Read more
Accounting, accountability, and abstraction have been (or, at least, have been said to have been) central to neoliberalism, as both practices and rhetorics. Performances of accounting activities, which constitute and link particular instances, actions, or subjects with economic and governmental regimes of abstraction, are undertaken (or called for) in order to hold individuals or institutions … Read more
I begin this article by reflecting on one of the biggest professional mistakes I have ever made. I became a part of corporate humanitarianism in 2006, when IOM Korea invited me to be part of a research project on trafficking of Korean women overseas, sponsored by the Bom-bit Foundation, an NGO set up by the … Read more
