Scholar Faranak Miraftab will explore the exploitation of immigrant labor for the next International Seminar Series talk at noon Wednesday, November 7, in the Prairie Room of the Bone Student Center.
Miraftab, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will draw on her research on the Midwestern meatpacking industry’s recruitment of labor from a range of countries, including Mexico, Togo, Puerto Rico, and beyond.
Through the stories of workers in the heartland and their families in their communities of origin, she will shed light on how a globally mobile labor force is produced and how the term “immigration” conceals the violence involved in global production and social reproduction of cheap labor.
Miraftab has served as a consultant to the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements’ Gender and Habitat program. Her most recent book Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives and Local Placemaking received the Association of Collegiate Schools and Planning’s Paul Davidoff Book Award and the American Sociology Society’s Global & Transnational Sociology Section Book Award.
The International Seminar Series offers the Illinois State campus and Bloomington-Normal communities weekly opportunities to learn about a wide range of international topics. Guest speakers are experts in their fields across a range of disciplines who cover a wide array of cultural, historical, political, and social topics.
International Seminar Series events are free and open to the public and occur every Wednesday from noon-1 p.m. in the Bone Student Center. The fall 2018 series will focus on immigration. For a full schedule, see the Office of International Studies website.
