The president of the world's oldest human rights organization is speaking at the next "Remembering the Crossings" event at Grand Valley State University.
Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves, the U.S. sister organization of Anti-Slavery International, will speak on Monday, February 12, at 1 p.m. in the GVSU Cook-DeWitt Center, on the Allendale Campus. His lecture, "Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy" will draw from his 1999 book of the same title, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and has been translated into ten languages.
The World Affairs council is also sponsoring a lecture by Bales at 7 p.m. at Aquinas College. Calvin College, Davenport College and Hope College will also host Bales. For more information and a complete listing, visit www.gvsu.edu/abolition.
This lecture is part of Remembering the Crossings, a series of events throughout the year to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Grand Valley is one of many area institutions and organizations presenting programs.
Bales, a professor of sociology at Roehampton University, in London, was a consultant to the United Nations Global Program on Trafficking of Human Beings. He has been a policy advisor to the U.S., British, Irish, Norwegian and Nepali governments and edited an Anti-Human Trafficking Toolkit for the United Nations. He has also published, with the Human Rights Center at Berkeley, a report on forced labor in the U.S. and several other books.
