Laura T Murphy
Laura T. Murphy is Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University (UK).
Professor Murphy’s research is broadly interested in forced labour globally, with a particular interest in survivor narratives and first-person testimony. She is currently working on several research projects about the Chinese government’s intertwined systems of internment and forced labour that have been inflicted on the people of the Uyghur Region. The work investigates the international supply chains that have ties to those repressive systems, including in the automotive, apparel, chemicals/plastics, solar, and critical minerals sectors. She has previously conducted research on forced labour in India, Nigeria, Ghana, the United States, and Canada.
She is the author of Freedomville: The Story of a 21st Century Slave Revolt, The New Slave Narrative: The Battle over Representations of Contemporary Slavery (Columbia University Press, 2019), editor of Survivors of Slavery: Modern-Day Slave Narratives (Columbia University Press, 2014), and author of Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature (Ohio University Press, 2012).
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. She has consulted for the World Health Organization, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Office of Victims of Crime, and the National Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance Center.
She has been the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, a British Academy Visiting Fellow, and the John G. Medlin Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Her work has been funded by the UK Foreign Commonwealth Development Office, Freedom Fund, Laudes Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Department of Justice, and Covenant House International.
Professor Murphy’s research is broadly interested in forced labour globally, with a particular interest in survivor narratives and first-person testimony. She is currently working on several research projects about the Chinese government’s intertwined systems of internment and forced labour that have been inflicted on the people of the Uyghur Region. The work investigates the international supply chains that have ties to those repressive systems, including in the automotive, apparel, chemicals/plastics, solar, and critical minerals sectors. She has previously conducted research on forced labour in India, Nigeria, Ghana, the United States, and Canada.
She is the author of Freedomville: The Story of a 21st Century Slave Revolt, The New Slave Narrative: The Battle over Representations of Contemporary Slavery (Columbia University Press, 2019), editor of Survivors of Slavery: Modern-Day Slave Narratives (Columbia University Press, 2014), and author of Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature (Ohio University Press, 2012).
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. She has consulted for the World Health Organization, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Office of Victims of Crime, and the National Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance Center.
She has been the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, a British Academy Visiting Fellow, and the John G. Medlin Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Her work has been funded by the UK Foreign Commonwealth Development Office, Freedom Fund, Laudes Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Department of Justice, and Covenant House International.
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Books by Laura T Murphy
Millions of people around the world today are enslaved; nearly eight million of them live in India, more than anywhere else. This book is the story of a small group of enslaved villagers in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, who founded their own town of Azad Nagar—Freedomville—after staging a rebellion against their slaveholders. International organizations championed this as a nonviolent “silent revolution” that inspired other villagers to fight for their own freedom. But Laura T. Murphy, a leading scholar of contemporary global slavery, who spent years researching and teaching about Freedomville, found that whispers and deflections suggested that there was something troubling about Azad Nagar’s success.
Murphy embarks on a Rashomon-like retelling—a complex, constantly changing narrative of a murder that captures better than any sanitized account just why it is that slavery continues to exist in the twenty-first century. Freedomville’s enormous struggle to gain and maintain liberty shows why it is unrealistic to expect radical change without violent protest—and how a global construction boom is deepening and broadening the alienation of impoverished people around the world.
In this pathbreaking interdisciplinary study, Laura T. Murphy argues that the slave narrative has reemerged as a twenty-first-century genre that has gained new currency in the context of the memoir boom, post-9/11 anti-Islamic sentiment, and conservative family-values politics. She analyzes a diverse range of dozens of book-length accounts of modern slavery from Africa, Asia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, examining the narrative strategies that survivors of slavery employ to make their experiences legible and to promote a reinvigorated antislavery agenda. By putting these stories into conversation with one another, The New Slave Narrative reveals an emergent survivor-centered counterdiscourse of collaboration and systemic change that offers an urgent critique of the systems that maintain contemporary slavery, as well as of the human rights industry and the antislavery movement.
Reports by Laura T Murphy
This report traces some of the XPCC’s most important products and services – cotton, tomatoes, chemicals, and construction – out to the rest of the world through supply chains and investments, revealing the way international spending supports this regime of oppression.
The Uyghur Region is being used as both a source of cheap labour and cheap coal, and also as a dumping ground for the most hideous of environmental hazards. The abuse of human labour and the environment in the XUAR has significantly reduced the price of manufacturing PVC and thus of manufacturing luxury flooring worldwide.
Through these abusive practices, Uyghur forced labour makes its way into our homes, schools, and hospitals, serving as the very literal foundations upon which we work and play. PVC is not alone on these counts. Uyghur forced labour also makes its way into the food we eat, the computers we work on, the toys we play with, the clothes we wear. This report provides a road map for understanding the violations occurring in the Uyghur Region and for identifying how the products of those abuses pervade supply chains.
Significant evidence suggests that several of IFC’s clients are active participants in the implementation of the PRC government’s campaign of repression against the Uyghurs, including through forced labour, forced displacement, cultural erasure, and environmental destruction. IFC’s failure to adequately safeguard communities and the environment affected by its financing in the Uyghur Region makes the institution complicit in the repression of Uyghur, Kazakh, and other minoritized citizens.
"Financing & Genocide" presents credible evidence that IFC financing is contributing to companies committing gross human rights abuses against Uyghur peoples in the XUAR and makes evidence-based recommendations to IFC and other development finance institutions.
The Uyghur Region produces approximately 85% of all of China's cotton, and in the last several years, China has encouraged the rapid growth of cotton goods manufacturing in the Uyghur Region. 52% of China's export of raw cotton, yarn, and fabric goes to Bangladesh, Vietnam, Philippines, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Cambodia. Manufacturers in these countries serve as intermediaries in finishing cotton-based apparel, thus obscuring the provenance of the cotton.
Because of the growth of the polysilicon industry in the Uyghur Region, solar industry supply chains are particularly exposed to forced labour of Uyghur and other minoritized citizens. We analysed government documents, state and corporate media, and corporate disclosures to trace the solar module supply chain from quartz to module, revealing how our clean energy is reliant on state-sponsored forced labour.
Research has shown individuals experiencing trafficking are likely to seek health care during or around the period of their exploitation. Health care is a critical access point for help, yet health care institutions and providers may not know how to respond.
The core competencies were developed over a three-year consultation period with, health care, behavioral health and social service experts as well as survivors, all of whom identified the need for a strategy to improve health systems and providers’ response to human trafficking. These experts represented a broad range of disciplines, including general practice, psychiatry, pediatrics, emergency medicine, child protection, nursing, behavioral health, research, health science and administration.
Papers by Laura T Murphy
Millions of people around the world today are enslaved; nearly eight million of them live in India, more than anywhere else. This book is the story of a small group of enslaved villagers in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, who founded their own town of Azad Nagar—Freedomville—after staging a rebellion against their slaveholders. International organizations championed this as a nonviolent “silent revolution” that inspired other villagers to fight for their own freedom. But Laura T. Murphy, a leading scholar of contemporary global slavery, who spent years researching and teaching about Freedomville, found that whispers and deflections suggested that there was something troubling about Azad Nagar’s success.
Murphy embarks on a Rashomon-like retelling—a complex, constantly changing narrative of a murder that captures better than any sanitized account just why it is that slavery continues to exist in the twenty-first century. Freedomville’s enormous struggle to gain and maintain liberty shows why it is unrealistic to expect radical change without violent protest—and how a global construction boom is deepening and broadening the alienation of impoverished people around the world.
In this pathbreaking interdisciplinary study, Laura T. Murphy argues that the slave narrative has reemerged as a twenty-first-century genre that has gained new currency in the context of the memoir boom, post-9/11 anti-Islamic sentiment, and conservative family-values politics. She analyzes a diverse range of dozens of book-length accounts of modern slavery from Africa, Asia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, examining the narrative strategies that survivors of slavery employ to make their experiences legible and to promote a reinvigorated antislavery agenda. By putting these stories into conversation with one another, The New Slave Narrative reveals an emergent survivor-centered counterdiscourse of collaboration and systemic change that offers an urgent critique of the systems that maintain contemporary slavery, as well as of the human rights industry and the antislavery movement.
This report traces some of the XPCC’s most important products and services – cotton, tomatoes, chemicals, and construction – out to the rest of the world through supply chains and investments, revealing the way international spending supports this regime of oppression.
The Uyghur Region is being used as both a source of cheap labour and cheap coal, and also as a dumping ground for the most hideous of environmental hazards. The abuse of human labour and the environment in the XUAR has significantly reduced the price of manufacturing PVC and thus of manufacturing luxury flooring worldwide.
Through these abusive practices, Uyghur forced labour makes its way into our homes, schools, and hospitals, serving as the very literal foundations upon which we work and play. PVC is not alone on these counts. Uyghur forced labour also makes its way into the food we eat, the computers we work on, the toys we play with, the clothes we wear. This report provides a road map for understanding the violations occurring in the Uyghur Region and for identifying how the products of those abuses pervade supply chains.
Significant evidence suggests that several of IFC’s clients are active participants in the implementation of the PRC government’s campaign of repression against the Uyghurs, including through forced labour, forced displacement, cultural erasure, and environmental destruction. IFC’s failure to adequately safeguard communities and the environment affected by its financing in the Uyghur Region makes the institution complicit in the repression of Uyghur, Kazakh, and other minoritized citizens.
"Financing & Genocide" presents credible evidence that IFC financing is contributing to companies committing gross human rights abuses against Uyghur peoples in the XUAR and makes evidence-based recommendations to IFC and other development finance institutions.
The Uyghur Region produces approximately 85% of all of China's cotton, and in the last several years, China has encouraged the rapid growth of cotton goods manufacturing in the Uyghur Region. 52% of China's export of raw cotton, yarn, and fabric goes to Bangladesh, Vietnam, Philippines, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Cambodia. Manufacturers in these countries serve as intermediaries in finishing cotton-based apparel, thus obscuring the provenance of the cotton.
Because of the growth of the polysilicon industry in the Uyghur Region, solar industry supply chains are particularly exposed to forced labour of Uyghur and other minoritized citizens. We analysed government documents, state and corporate media, and corporate disclosures to trace the solar module supply chain from quartz to module, revealing how our clean energy is reliant on state-sponsored forced labour.
Research has shown individuals experiencing trafficking are likely to seek health care during or around the period of their exploitation. Health care is a critical access point for help, yet health care institutions and providers may not know how to respond.
The core competencies were developed over a three-year consultation period with, health care, behavioral health and social service experts as well as survivors, all of whom identified the need for a strategy to improve health systems and providers’ response to human trafficking. These experts represented a broad range of disciplines, including general practice, psychiatry, pediatrics, emergency medicine, child protection, nursing, behavioral health, research, health science and administration.
Nation magazine (Nigeria), he reveals his desperately optimistic
insistence on collective substantive freedoms. Jeyifo’s response to
the situation is one of doubling complexity, pointing to the
systemic violence that not only made the girls vulnerable, but also
produces the young male perpetrator/victims who hold the girls
captive and that holds the nation captive as well. In this paper,
Murphy argues that Jeyifo’s complex reading of denied substantive
freedoms in (what he might now call) a captive era in Nigerian
history also provides a lens for removing the “familiar mask of the
righteous judge” represented by the Western iteration of the
#BringBackOurGirls movement. The paper interrogates the way in
which Boko Haram tapped into the exaggerated post-9/11 fears
that Islamic militants were a threat to Western values and freedom
and provided evidence for Christian fundamentalist mythologies of
a clash of civilizations. The paper suggests that the fervent
discourse regarding the Boko Haram kidnappings point to a contest
of fundamentalist ideologies, two opposing but tactically similar
movements that ignore the structural lack of substantive freedoms
that bring members into their fold.