In Part 2 of this two-part series on human trafficking, the focus shifts from sex work to migrant labour, and what is left out when trafficking frameworks dominate policy responses. Joined again by co-hosts Dr. Katrin Roots (Wilfrid Laurier University), Dr. Jessica Templeman (Memorial University), and Dr. Ann De Shalit (University of Windsor), this episode centres the work and expertise of migrant justice organizer and scholar Dr. Evelyn Encalada-Grez. Drawing on decades of organizing with migrant farm workers, Evelyn exposes how Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and immigration enforcement actively produce the very conditions (precarity, coercion, abuse, and violence) that anti-trafficking discourse claims to address.
Dr. Evelyn Encalada Grez is a transnational labour scholar and community-labour organizer committed to critical sociology and decolonial theories of knowledge production that centres diverse ways of knowing and precarious workers’ experiences within the margins of the global economy. She is the co-founder of the award-winning collective, Justice for Migrant WorkersJ4MW), that has advocated for the rights of migrant farmworkers in Canada for two decades. Her research bridges grassroots activism with academic scholarship. Through this approach, Dr. Encalada Grez has extensively documented the lives of Mexican migrant farmworker women who work and forge transnational livelihoods between rural Canada and rural Mexico. As a public sociologist, Dr. Encalada Grez has mobilized her research through various media sources such as documentaries, and given talks in venues such as Parliament Hill, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and at the United Nations in New York. She has also worked transnationally with export-processing workers in Mexico and Central America, and as lead travelling faculty teaching US university students in over 6 countries. For three semesters, she was also the Academic Director of an intensive social justice study abroad program in her city of birth, Valparaiso, Chile. Dr. Encalada Grez is driven by her immigrant working class experiences and committed to decolonializing and transformative pedagogies.
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. 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 two-part series was supported 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.