Lyndsey Beutin is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Media Arts at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She earned her PhD in Communication from the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania and was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the racial politics of communication, social justice, and the relationships among public and collective memory of slavery and demands for reparations and redress. Her first book, Trafficking in Antiblackness: Modern-Day Slavery, White Indemnity, and Racial Justice (Duke University Press, 2023), explores how campaigns against human trafficking use the memory of transatlantic slavery to reproduce antiblackness in the name of ending so-called “modern-day slavery.” She has been involved with community projects for farm worker rights, queer liberation,prison abolition, reparations and racial justice in NC, VA, PA, and NY. Her writing has appeared in Cultural Studies, Surveillance & Society, Feminist Media Studies, Anti-Trafficking Review, and Southern Cultures.

Elena Shih is Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, where she directs a human trafficking research cluster with the Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. She also the co-author of, White Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking (2022), with Kamala Kempadoo, an edited volume that explores the hidden sources of systemic power built into anti-trafficking interventions. Recent op-eds about her research and organizing as a core collective member of Red Canary Song appear in The New York Times, Providence Journal, Myanmar Times and Al Jazeera. Shih serves on the editorial boards for The Anti-Trafficking Review, a peer-reviewed journal of the Global Alliance to Combat Traffic in Women, and openDemocracy's Beyond Trafficking and Slavery op-ed platform. Shih earned a Phd in Sociology from UCLA, and a BA in Asian Studies and Women’s Studies from Pomona College.