PULLMAN, Wash. – Award-winning humanitarian, professor and author Kevin Bales will present “New Slavery in the Global Economy” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 6, in the CUB auditorium at Washington State University.
Hosted by the WSU Global Campus in affiliation with WSU Common Reading, the free, public talk also will be videostreamed to an audience around the world at mms://windowsmedia.wsu.edu/stream.
Bales has advised governments, addressed Nobel Peace laureates, co-founded an international anti-slavery organization and a fundraising company, and written several books about modern slavery.
His 1999 “Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy” was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, is published in 10 languages and was the basis for a movie that won a Peabody award in 2000 and two Emmy awards in 2002. The book examines five slave-based businesses: prostitution in Thailand, selling water in Mauritania, production of charcoal in Brazil, general agriculture in India and brickmaking in Pakistan.
He is writing a book on the relationship between slavery and environmental destruction. Another co-written text will examine forced marriage worldwide.
Bales is a professor of contemporary slavery at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at the United Kingdom’s University of Hull, about 200 miles north of London. He lives in Brighton, England.
He co-founded and is former president of Free the Slaves, an international human rights organization that estimates there are 27 million enslaved workers worldwide, with more than 14,500 trafficked into the U.S. each year. He consulted on the United Nation’s Global Program on Trafficking of Human Beings, edited an anti-human trafficking toolkit for the U.N., and published a report on forced labor in the U.S. with the human rights center at the University of California Berkeley.
Bales earned his B.A. in anthropology from the University of Oklahoma; M.A. in sociology from the University of Mississippi; and M.Sc. in economic history and Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. In 1990, he co-founded the fundraising and research consultancy Pell & Bales, Ltd.; by Nov. 2011, it had raised $1.6 billion dollars for medical charities, human rights groups, environmental campaigns, overseas development and the Labour Party.
A Bales lecture can be viewed at http://bit.ly/aZvHHY.