DU held the first bi-annual Conference on Religion, Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery this past weekend, in an effort to raise awareness to the efforts of faith-based institutions to stop present-day slavery and human trafficking.
The conference ran last Thursday, March 31, to Saturday, April 2, and was sponsored by the Joint PhD program in Religious and Theological studies, in cooperation with the DU Office of Special Community Programs and Conferences and the Korbel Human Trafficking Clinic.
Carl Raschke, one of the two organizers, hopes this conference, the first “national and international academic conference of this kind,” will bring more awareness of the work that faith-based organizations are doing on this subject.
He also emphasized the importance of collaboration among people and types of organizations working together to solve this issue together.
More than 200 people preregistered for the conference, but Raschke believed the on-site registration raised that number. The conference recruited presenters from Africa, Middle East, South East Asia and Latin America.
Tessa Powell, who helped represent the Human Trafficking Clinic at Korbel, noted how the conference will contribute to more interdisciplinary approaches to human trafficking in the research and curriculum at Korbel, as well as getting more students involved.
James Stewart, a visiting Marisco scholar, spoke to about 50 people in Lindsay auditorium on Thursday night to kick off the conference, in a talk called “Toward a New Abolitionist Movement: Historical Slavery, Contemporary Slavery, and the Religious Imagination.” Stewart is the founder of Historians Against Slavery, an organization of scholars who study and teach the history of African slavery in the United States and work to abolish present-day slavery.
Stewart gave students tips to work towards ending modern-day slavery by speaking on how abolitionists in the 1800s brought about the end of slavery.
One important tool the abolitionists used, according to Stewart, was their uncompromising demand for the “immediate, unconditional, uncompensated emancipation of slaves.”
Stewart instructed students to “pare the problem down to your own community.” He emphasized the importance of building relationships with community members to combat the problem.
Dealing with post-slavery reintegration and not selling products made by slaves are important projects that students can get involved with today, he said.
He said that the modern abolitionist movement should be concerned both with action and communication, pointing out that informing and motivating people is the greatest challenge for modern abolitionists.
David Batstone, theologian and professor of business at the University of San Francisco, the plenary speaker, spoke to about 50 people in the Governor’s Ballroom in the Driscoll Center on Friday night.
Batstone affirmed Stewart’s emphasis on communication, collaboration and inspiration as the main goals of the modern abolitionist.
“The smart activist movement was aimed at empowering,” said Batstone.
His organization, Not For Sale, raises money for post-slavery recovery, as well as creates tools to help people avoid making products that are a result of slavery.
Not For Sale has several current projects, including Free2Work, which grades companies on their support of slavery. His project has created an applications for iPhone and Droid so people can look up companies’ grades while shopping.
Smart activism is about bringing together on-the-ground activists “who have PhDs in the streets,” he said, with institutional activists, “people who have PhDs and research degrees from universities.”
For more information, students can contact professor Carl Raschke in the Religious Studies Department at carlraschke@gmail.com
