CFP: White Slavery in Transnational and International Context, 1880-1950

21 June 2019 | 10:00-18:00 | University of Warwick

Followed by a drinks reception

This is a call for abstracts for paper, poster and creative presentations for a one-day interdisciplinary conference on white slavery, as trafficking in women was historically called.

The conference seeks to question how white slavery manifested in transnational and international contexts but welcomes papers on any localities.
We welcome papers exploring different aspects of white slavery from nationalism to visual representations, and their impact on anti-white slavery legislation.
The conference seeks to investigate white slavery and its legacies from conceptual, legal, popular culture perspectives. It also seeks to place it in relation to wider themes of nationalism, race, gender, and labour, and question how white slavery relates to critiques of modernity.
We invite paper and poster presentations from range of disciplines that explore how white slavery manifested in these different contexts, in different localities, during the years 1880-1950. The conference is particularly interested in exploring white slavery through the following themes:

• Race, nationality and nationalism
• Regulation/criminalisation of white slavery in domestic and international sphere
• Rhetoric of slavery and neo-abolitionism
• Age, innocence and purity
• Agency, autonomy and free will
• Gender; trafficking in boys/men
• Migration and gendered labour
• Critique of modernity
• White slavery in popular culture/media