This is a response to the above debate.
The University of Nottingham recently offered a free and open online course – known as a ‘MOOC’ – entitled Ending Slavery. According to the course conveners, the solutions offered in this course focus on bottom-up, ‘evidence-based’ approaches to resisting exploitation, which holds out the prospect of a welcome departure from more sensational and paternalistic anti-trafficking programmes using rescue-based remedies. This comparative moderation, along with cutting-edge methods of presenting data-driven outcomes and the MOOC’s academic home, are designed to offer an attractive alternative when it comes to ‘raising awareness’ of both problems and potential solutions. However, as I shall attempt to explain below, it is precisely this presentation – the packaging if you will – that helps to conceal the severe methodological flaws and ahistorical, acontextual nature of what the Nottingham MOOC is ultimately ‘selling’.
Ending slavery
Ending Slavery sets the stage for its proposed solution to severe exploitation using historical slave uprisings in the Caribbean as a foil and comparative for discussion. The instructors present these prolonged and highly organised slave rebellions as powerful and inspirational but ultimately failed revolutions, which sets up the call for more seemingly reliable paths to liberation, such as training and education. In the comments left following the slave revolt module many students admitted to not having heard of the massive resistance of the enslaved in the nineteenth century, but also expressed discomfort with the key role of violence in bringing about social and legal transformation.
