Researching "slave labour": an experiment in critical pedagogy

Using terms such as “new slavery” and “slave labour” to describe employment relations in the twenty-first century can evoke historical continuity with the transatlantic slave trade and the enslavement of African people and their descendants in the Americas. Aware of this when we set about making this experimental video (see Figure 1) for teaching purposes, we were concerned with two sets of questions: first, how useful are terms like “new slavery” and “slave labour” for analyzing contemporary labour relations? Do the terms themselves have pernicious effects? How has this been debated by scholars? The second set of questions revolved around the research process itself, focusing on the often awkward and contradictory relations between researchers and people whose lives are being researched. Out of both sets of questions emerged a third connecting thread: what are the standpoints of people being researched regarding the use of categories such as “slave labour” – and does the literature take adequate account of these?