"New Ways of Seeing: Survivor Rhetoric and (Re)Writing Stories of Human Trafficking, listens to the ways survivors of human trafficking tell their stories and applies their reflections to problematize culturally situated discourses around the issue. Employing a methodology of care and situated within a cultural rhetorics paradigm, this project draws from decolonial, feminist, and indigenous theories to demonstrate how mainstream conversations around human trafficking have been framed in the discourse of globality, thereby rendering us less capable of hearing the voices of those most impacted. I explore how participants' storytelling practices reveal multi-layered rhetorics of recognition that push against the pervasive tendency of abstractifying discourses around the issue of human trafficking. I further demonstrate how the participants engage in a negotiation between the articulation of self and the use of the rhetorical frames of dominant human trafficking narratives to both encounter and confront colonizing language, while subversively using that same language to connect with the external. The project illuminates potential paths forward for a paradigmatic shift away from the globalized, colonizing rhetoric that has to-date defined human rights issues." -- Abstract.
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