Professional Affiliation

Associate Professor of Anthropology, Georgetown University

Expert Bio

As a cultural anthropologist, my research agenda is informed by three concerns: migration, gender and labor. While these topics may be pursued across disciplines, anthropologists' ethnographic methods enable me to analyze their local contexts as they connect to larger forces of change.

Because my research illuminates such urgent human rights concerns as trafficking, women's poverty, and migrant labor exploitation, I see my research as part of what has been called "public anthropology." My specific research and policy concerns emerge from my commitment to use anthropology to better understand how poor women and men in the developing world craft long-term labor strategies to move their families out of poverty, exploring, in particular, international migration as a labor strategy.

This research agenda has produced two book-length projects. The first, What's Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Duke University Press 2004), is based on field research in the Dominican Republic. It focuses on poor women's use of the sex industry in the Dominican Republic as a stepping-stone to international migration through marriage to foreign clients. It lays bare the connection between large structural forces in the globalized economy and their effects on individuals in a sex-tourist destination – particularly as they face hierarchies based on race, gender and citizenship.My research trajectory has expanded into a broader inquiry of trafficking and exploitation of migrant labor in the United States and how migrants struggle to maintain control over their work lives.

My current book project builds on my activities as both a researcher and an activist on issues related to women's work and women's migration in the global economy. In the late 1990's, I participated in what was called the "Trafficking Working Group." Participants included human rights lawyers, women's advocates, migrants' rights advocates, and social workers at refugee resettlement agencies.

The working group helped form the "Freedom Network," an umbrella organization whose members include social-service agencies and migrant rights' organizations that assist in the resettlement of trafficked persons. These organizations were confronting an immediate task of assisting trafficked persons resettle in the United States, under newly enacted legislation designed to protect individuals found in situations of severe exploitation. Social-service agencies had no experience resettling trafficked persons. They looked like refugees; but not quite. It was a new group with its own challenges.

Through my involvement with this group, I was able to meet and interview formerly trafficked persons about their experiences of resettlement. These interviews reveal that life after trafficking is a series of mundane everyday struggles -- usually not the stuff of press conferences or headline-grabbing news. This contrasts with media accounts of trafficking which tend to dwell on the spectacular – the horrors of life in trafficking and dramatic stories of escapes or rescues. Formerly trafficked persons' concerns about work, housing, or schooling resemble those of other migrants. This connection between formerly trafficked persons' and other migrants' experiences with resettlement – particularly with labor issues –is my main research focus.

 

Education

B.A. (1986) Smith College, Northampton, MA; M.A. (1991), Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), WDC; Ph.D. (1998), Yale University, New Haven, CT

 

Experience

Associate and Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. 1998-present

 

Expertise

Migration, forced labor, and trafficking in the United States; sex tourism and women's labor in the Dominican Republic

Wilson Center Project

"Starting Over: Life After Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States"

Project Summary

This project asks two questions: How do persons who have been trafficked to the United States rebuild their lives and are their experiences within a particular form of migration different from – or similar to – other migrants? This book explores these questions by focusing on their struggles and successes with the everyday tasks and chores of resettlement -- finding a home, finding work, finding friends. Over the past few years I have been interviewing individuals who have received T visas, a new form of visa available through anti-trafficking legislation enacted in 2000. Extending the insights of research on the resettlement of refugees, I examine how the individuated acts of violence and resettlement that trafficked persons undergo (rather than collective acts affecting refugees) shape the nature of their resettlement, particularly their relationship to their co-ethnic community.



Through in-depth ethnographic work, I situate trafficking and its after-effects along a continuum of exploitative labor practices that migrants (documented, undocumented and trafficked) experience in work sites throughout the United States. This comparison has led to my argument that trafficking is a particularly violent form of migrant labor exploitation that emerges out of more mundane, everyday labor practices in places where migrants work. Forced labor is just one part of a larger story of exploitation of undocumented migrants as a way of doing business in many worksites. This finding illustrates that the prevention of trafficking is inextricably tied up with securing greater workplace protections for undocumented migrants. Comprehensive immigration reform that protects undocumented

workers' rights is an essential step to ending trafficking in the United States.

The book, thus, contributes to broader issues in migration scholarship and policy, including not only the vulnerability of undocumented migrants to a range of labor abuses, but also the lack of trust between migrant communities and law enforcement in the wake of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and arrests throughout the United States.

Major Publications

• What's Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic, (Durham: Duke University Press, May 2004)
• "Competing Claims of Victimhood?: Foreign and Domestic Victims of Trafficking in the United States," Sexuality Research & Social Policy. Special Edition: Sexual Commerce and the Global Flows of Bodies, Desires and Social Policies, 5(4): 45-61. 2008;
• "Methodological Challenges in Research on Human Trafficking: Tales from the Field," International Migration 43(1/2):35-54 2005