Accepted Panels

Abstract Panel

Panel Details

	Name	Affiliation	Country
Convenor	Prof. Ann Kingsolver	University of Kentucky	United States
Co-convenor	Prof. Sandya Hewamanne	University of Essex	United Kingdom

Panel No	:	P023
Title	:	Women Envisioning Futures Beyond the Borders of Marginalization in Global Foreign Trade Zone Work
Sponsoring commission(s)	:	IUAES Human Rights Commission
Short Abstract	:	This session will share analyses by women who work as anthropologists and women who work in Foreign Trade Zones (FTZs) in the Americas and Asia, and will contribute to anthropological discussions of human rights, globalization, and women’s agency and livelihoods. Women are often represented as the optimal FTZ labor force without attention to their well-being. Women’s analyses of how their FTZ work fits into their livelihood pasts, present, and futures will be presented and compared.
Long Abstract	:	This session will share analyses by women who work as anthropologists and women who work in Foreign Trade Zones (FTZs) in the Americas and Asia. Drawing on world anthropologies and human rights perspectives, this discussion will contribute to anthropological scholarship connecting specific local and national processes of social minoritization and economic marginalization with the labor regimes imposed through global networks of FTZs. Women are often advertised as the most affordable and compliant labor force for transnational corporations operating in FTZs because of their socially and economically marginalized positions (by gender, and often doubly by racialized or ethnic identities). FTZs are promoted as contributing economically to the regions in which they are constructed, but there are hidden costs preventing full accountability to local communities and the sites themselves – as well as labor conditions within them – are often also far from transparent in local contexts. The COVID-19 pandemic brought international public attention to supply chains, briefly, rendering labor conditions in some FTZs less opaque, and there have been increasing attempts to organize workers for better working conditions and compensation. Overall, however, the relationship between governments and corporate operators within FTZs does not foreground the well-being or rights of workers. In this session, women’s analyses of how their FTZ work fits into their livelihood pasts, present, and futures will be presented and then compared. In some cases, women in India and Sri Lanka who have worked or been trained in FTZs are followed as they use that training and/or those earnings to envision new livelihood futures for themselves and others. In another case presented, women encountering the construction of a new FTZ in the rural US reflect on their past livelihoods (agricultural, for example) and what the new FTZ with its “green jobs” might mean for them and their community.