Genevieve LeBaron and Kevin Bales On Forced Labor and Modern Slavery

Genevieve LeBaron and Kevin Bales, of the Gilder Lehrman Center’s Modern Slavery Working Group, join Tom Thurston on this episode of Slavery and Its Legacies. 

Genevieve LeBaron is a Senior Lecturer in Politics attached to both the Department of Politics and SPERI at the University of Sheffield. She is Founder of openDemocracy.net’s Beyond Trafficking and Slavery, a popular journalistic site that brings together stakeholders who are serious about tackling modern slavery’s economic, political, and social root causes.  

Her research focuses on the business and governance of forced labour in the global economy. Her research has been published in leading academic journals including Socio-Economy Review, Review of International Political Economy, and Regulation & Governance. It has attracted funding from the UK ESRC, Canadian SSHRC, British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Ford Foundation, and Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Her research has been profiled widely in the media, including by The Economist, Forbes and The Guardian.

Prior to joining the University of Sheffield, Genevieve was based at the University of British Columbia. She holds a PhD and MA in Political Science from York University, Toronto, and a BA from The Evergreen State College. She has held visiting positions at Yale University, the International Labour Organization, the University of California, Berkeley, Osgoode Hall Law School, and Sciences Po.

Kevin Bales is Professor of Contemporary Slavery at the University of Nottingham, UK. He was a Co-Founder of Free the Slaves in Washington, D.C. and is Lead Author of the Global Slavery Index. 

Going undercover to meet slaves and slaveholders, Kevin Bales exposed how modern slavery penetrates the global economy in his Pulitzer-nominated book, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. The film based on this book, Slavery: A Global Investigation (TrueVision), which he co-wrote for HBO and Channel 4, won a Peabody Award and two Emmys.