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The P-16 classroom, already a space of potential conflicts and contradictions, gained new levels of complexity with the overlapping crises of 2020 onward: the COVID-19 pandemic; police brutality and corresponding "summer of abolition;" book and mask bans; and anti-critical race theory and anti-social emotional learning legislation. In this paper, we respond to these crises with collaboration through the concept of interdependency. Using disability and transformative justice organizer Mia Mingus's definition of interdependency, we argue that an interdependent classroom can be a way out of narratives of atomized disconnection. Interdependency sees an individual's survival as inherently connected to a larger community, emphasizing solidarity over the illusion of independence. Inspired by duoethnographic methods, we share our own reflections as students and teachers in classrooms where connection may or may not have been present. We find that, though we cannot go back to "normal," we can go forward into new classroom context where white supremacist ideologies do not shape students' and teachers' shared learning experiences. Instead, interdependence can serve as a form of creative resistance to the more implicit forms of harm embedded in educational experiences, opening up platforms to counter marginalization and speak against what has been traditionally silenced.

COVID-19 profoundly shaped how service providers in the antiviolence sector interact with clients, coworkers, and community stakeholders. In addition to stressors inherent in antiviolence work, service providers negotiated new, challenging social distancing and remote communication strategies. In this paper, we analyze interviews with 23 antiviolence workers in the US Great Plains region, focusing on participants' descriptions of workplace boundaries and intimacy. We demonstrate how COVID-19 both expanded and contracted public/private boundaries and formal/informal connections in antiviolence workers' daily experiences. Pandemic conditions revealed the pressing need for frontline workers to exercise discretion over levels of intimate engagement with coworkers and clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human trafficking is predominantly framed as a criminal justice issue with sensationalised, highly visible violence. Stereotypical figures of young women in danger, passively poised to be rescued by figures of the state or vigilante justice, animate public discourse and policy. Yet the reality of trafficking is often far more complex than the linear narratives presented in the mainstream. In this article, I argue that human trafficking is more readily accessible as slow violence, the accumulation and accretion of the consequences of systematic oppression over time. I use Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor to articulate a stance against the flash of trafficking's 'master narratives'. Slow violence offers three key elements for theorising human trafficking, i.e. that the harms are so gradual or delayed they: become imperceptible; compound over protracted durations of time; and may be so mundane and unspectacular to not even register as 'violence' in our vernacular. Aligned with a critical trafficking studies approach that draws attention to power dynamics and imbalances, slow violence focuses on the forms of exploitation and precarity that are taken for granted or assumed to be static. I use a collection of artifacts and examples from dominant anti-trafficking organisations and media to demonstrate the urgency required to both rethink trafficking against these flattening overgeneralisations and recommit to a transformative practice that makes more lives liveable. In the tradition of feminist anti-violence scholarship, I conclude by shifting from the micro-level examples of trafficking that fuel misinformation campaigns to the systems that perpetuate violence, exploitation and extraction – and must be eradicated if we are committed to ending human trafficking locally and globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti‐human trafficking efforts are increasingly folded into normative frontline work sectors. Service providers must expand their understanding of clients to include the needs of exploited or trafficked persons, even though they may not receive a commensurate increase in training or resources to accommodate these new cases. Using semi‐structured interviews with 54 service providers in the US Midwest, this paper argues that frontline workers move beyond "traditional" emotional labor to labor inflected with forms of crisis, dirty, edge, or extreme work when confronted with trafficking. The specific needs of trafficked clients require the utilization of normatively gendered client care practices: listening, empathizing, performing appropriate responses to clients' emotional displays. However, new or compounding stressors may emerge alongside these new service populations. In order to ethically provide services without risking increased burnout, street‐level bureaucracies must invest in resources for frontline workers to invest in their own emotional well‐being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the research on human trafficking focuses on the prosecution of traffickers and protection of survivors after the crime has occurred. Less is known about the social disparities that make someone vulnerable to trafficking. This project examines human trafficking from a preventive focus, using data from a case study of service providers working with at-risk populations in the Kansas City, MO-KS area. The research team conducted 42 in-depth interviews with service providers working in the medical, educational, legal, and social services sectors from 2013 to 2016. Participants identified risk factors that could make someone vulnerable to labor or sexual exploitation. These factors clustered into four key areas: economic insecurity, housing insecurity, education, and migration. The research findings also suggest that human trafficking may be driven by an accumulation of risk factors that move vulnerable persons closer to labor exploitation and sex trafficking, fitting with a chain-of-risk model. We propose a model that reconceives of trafficking as a continuum that includes a range of vulnerabilities, violence, and traumas. In order to address human trafficking, policy makers and advocates need to focus on upstream prevention factors to address vulnerabilities that can lead to sex and labor exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist scholars and activists engage in meaningful, contentious debates about the relationships among sex, gender, power, and society. One of the most recent iterations of these arguments reinscribes the pleasure of sex positivity and danger of patriarchal exploitation onto new subjects: sex work and human trafficking. This paper brings together two separate empirically based research projects, one working with sex workers and the other working with members of the anti-trafficking community. As scholars working across these topics, we provide new normative propositions that may bridge these different approaches to resilience, survival, danger, and risk. We find that the real threat identified by our participants was the wide reach of the carceral state onto migrating, working, and trafficked bodies. Our projects find unexpected commonality in shared perceptions of pleasure, agency, and danger among sex workers, human trafficking survivors, and service providers working with trafficked persons. Current debates ignore the lived experiences of our participants, who attempt to find pleasure in context-specific agency and survival, and who locate danger in the looming forces of the security state, criminality, and structural inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]