The Institute of Political Economy’s Winter 2021 Visiting Professor
Dr. Stephanie Redden is hosting a seminar titled: Hello from the Inside: Race, Gender, and Unfree Labour within the Transnationally Situated Prison Call Centre Industry.
Prison call center work is a relatively new development in the history of U.S. prison labour.

While prisoners “freely” engage in this labour, their decisions to do so are made within the constraints of incarceration. My project critically interrogates this industry by examining its racialized and gendered dynamics as well as how call center workers within and outside of the prison context are connected to each other and to the broader global political economy. Additionally, I explore similarities between the U.S. Government’s current marketing of unfree call center labour to private companies and other historical cases of the marketing of unfree labour (e.g. slave labour in antebellum America).

Dr. Redden completed a Ph.D. in Political Science with a specialization in Political Economy at Carleton University in November 2016. Before returning to the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton as a Visiting Scholar this semester she served as the 2019-2020 Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking Fellow at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Her work has been published in Globalizations, International Feminist Journal of Politics, as well as a number of edited collections. She is currently preparing a manuscript based on her doctoral research project that will be published as part of Rowman and Littlefield’s Global Political Economies of Gender and Sexuality series.