Uncovering Forced Labor

On today’s episode of Justice Matters, guest host Timothy Patrick McCarthy - faculty chair of the Global LGBTQI plus Human Rights Program - speaks with Laura Murphy, about forced labor and human rights. Laura Murphy is a professor at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK and one of the leading global experts on forced labor. Together they discuss: what led Laura to this work, the role of storytelling in human rights work, the complexity of violence in freedom movements, the terminology and uses of “forced labor” and “modern slavery”, forced labor among the Uyghur population in China, difficulties faced by academics and activists in addressing human rights abuses, and hope amidst the backlash. Laura Murphy is a Professor of Human Rights at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, and was recently a Biden administration appointee at the Department of Homeland Security, working on implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Her research currently focuses on forced labor in China and in international supply chains. She has written several books on forced labor globally including Freedomville (Columbia Global Reports, 2021) and The New Slave Narrative (Columbia University Press, 2019).

You can listen to Uncovering Forced Labor online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Uncovering Forced Labor is an episode from Justice Matters by Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

This episode is 01:10:25 long.

This episode was published on Apr 6, 2026.

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