When: Thursday, December 8, 2022, 4:00 PM - 6:00 PMWhere: Queens Building LG6, Mile End campus
Speaker: Laura Murphy, Sheffield Hallam University
This event is organised by the Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP).
The Uyghur Region of China (officially known as Xinjiang, known by many of its Indigenous people as East Turkestan) has been the center of the PRC's strategic program of state-sponsored forced labor. The nearly ubiquitous forced labour in the region affects glboal supply chains from apparel to renewable energy, plastics to electronics, raw materials to automobiles. This talk will discuss why the PRC government is expending so many resources on this program of oppression, on the ways the government manufactures vulnerability among its Indigenous citizens as justification for its actions, and on the discourses of "urgency" and "complexity" that international corporations use as shelter for their complicity.
Laura T. Murphy is Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery at the Helena Kennedy Centre at Sheffield Hallam University. She is author of numerous books and academic articles on the subject of forced labor and human trafficking globally. Her current work focuses on forced labor in the Uyghur Region of China, including in the solar, apparel, and building materials industries. She has provided expert testimony and evidence on the crisis in the Uyghur Region to the U.S., U.K., E.U., and Australian governments, as well as provided private briefings to government agencies, advocacy groups, law firms, and others interested in the issue globally.