Not your rescue project: Migrant sex workers fighting for justice

Join us for a panel on the book Not your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex workers fighting for justice. 

A landmark abolitionist primer on migration, sex work, policing, and the “anti-trafficking industry”—and a powerful argument about who is really leading the way toward justice: migrant sex workers themselves.

Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam will join us in person for a conversation with Niloofar Golkar, postdoctoral researcher at Concordia's Social Justice Centre.

The event will be hybrid: in person at the SHIFT Centre and online on zoom

Registration (free): Register here for in-person or online 

About the book 

In this impassioned corrective to decades of misguided, carceral approaches to migration and sex work, long-time organizers Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam deftly expose the harms of criminalization in the name of “anti-trafficking” and lift up migrant sex workers’ organizing in the US, Canada, and elsewhere. In doing so, they make the compelling case that the only effective response to the needs of migrant sex workers must be led by migrants in the sex trade, as they fight for rights, safety, and autonomy.

Gallant and Lam illustrate how this movement is taking aim at the root causes of violence and abuse: the white supremacist securitization of borders, the criminalization of both migration and sex work, the patriarchial devaluation of women’s labor, and forced displacement due to climate disaster, war, and poverty—all fueled by racial capitalism.

An indispensable exploration of the relationship between migration and sex work—and the underlying societal conditions they reflect—Not Your Rescue Project is a thorough indictment of the anti-trafficking industry as an engine of criminalization and state violence, and an instructive account of the emancipatory politics already being practiced by migrant sex workers in their organizing. Throughout, Gallant and Lam place migrant sex workers at the center of struggles against border imperialism, carceral states, and capitalism—dispelling a range of poisonous myths and paving the way for deeper alliances across movements with the shared goal of dismantling and abolishing carceralism in all its forms.

Co-sponsored by the Simone de Beauvoir Institute and Concordia's Social Justice Centre