This is the first in a special two-part series on human trafficking that takes a critical deep dive into trafficking discourse, state power, and their impact on migrant and sex workers. Avery Moore Kloss is joined by co-hosts Dr. Katrin Roots (Wilfrid Laurier University), Dr. Jessica Templeman (Memorial University), and Dr. Ann De Shalit (University of Windsor) to discuss human trafficking across policy, policing, and public narratives. Featuring interviews with legal scholar Vincent Wong and organizer/writer Chanelle Gallant, Part 1 traces how vague and flexible trafficking frameworks can expand carceral state power, amplify racialized and colonial logics of protection, and produce real-world harms through policing, surveillance, raids, detention, and deportation.
Vincent Wong joined the University of Windsor Faculty of Law as an Assistant Professor in 2022. He is also a PhD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School, where his dissertation focuses on racial capitalism and the processes that produce and structure unfree status-excluded labour in Canada. He serves on the board of the Community Justice Collective (Tkaronto). Professor Wong holds a Bachelor of Commerce and a Juris Doctor from the University of Toronto and a Master of Laws from Columbia Law School, where he was a Human Rights Fellow and James Kent Scholar. Professor Wong’s research focuses on law and political economy – specifically at the nexus between migration, race, markets, and the law. He is particularly interested in how a Canadian context-specific critical race theory (CRT) can better inform and be informed by the practice of anti-racist and intersectional movement lawyering. Professor Wong is also interested in what critical frameworks of law and political economy have to offer in the context of understanding the emerging hub of the 21st century global economic order: China.
Prior to academia, Professor Wong worked as a Staff Lawyer at the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic and Secretary of the Chinese Canadian National Council - Toronto Chapter. He has also previously held positions at the International Human Rights Program at the University of Toronto and the African American Policy Forum.
Chanelle Gallant is an abolitionist feminist who has been fighting to free women’s sexuality from criminalization for over 25 years. She is a frontline organizer, writer, thinker, strategist, and the co-author of Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice. Chanelle has contributed to dozens of influential publications, including Pleasure Activism, and spoken everywhere from Princeton, Columbia, and the London School of Economics to the UN Special Rapporteur, and at thousands of organizing meetings and trainings. She is currently a visiting Activist-Scholar at the Centre for Feminist Research at York University, Toronto. Chanelle cut her teeth fighting the cops as a core organizer in the historic fight against the Pussy Palace raid in 2000, and went on to found numerous sex work organizations and SURJ-Toronto. She now sits on the national board for multiple organizations in the US and Canada. Chanelle is a queer femme, a survivor, and the eldest daughter of a poor family that has been impacted by criminalization and incarceration. She works as a money coach and advisor, social movement strategy consultant, and trainer. Chanelle is a Lambda Literary Fellow and holds an M.A. in Sociology.
Dr. Katrin Roots is an Assistant Professor in Criminology at Wilfrid Laurier University and has researched Canada’s anti-trafficking efforts for over 15 years. She is the author of Domesticating Human Trafficking: Law, Policing and Prosecution in Canada (2022) and co-editor of Trafficking Harms: Critical Politics, Perspectives and Experiences (2024).
Dr. Jessica Templeman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland and a member of the Collaborative for Racial Justice. Her research focuses on exclusionary migration law and policy in Canada, including deportation for criminality and human trafficking.
Dr. Ann De Shalit is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Work at the University of Windsor and teaches at Trent and York Universities. She has conducted critical trafficking research since 2009 and has supported grassroots migrant and labour justice activism for over a decade.
This episode was funded by a Knowledge Synthesis Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
CRSP Talk is a production of the Centre for Research on Security Practices (CRSP) at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Part 2 continues the series with organizer and scholar Dr. Evelyn Encalada Grez, focusing on migrant workers, labour precarity, and resistance, where we discuss what changes when trafficking discourse is applied to labour sectors beyond sex work.