Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice

About Chanelle GallantElene Lam

Elene Lam is an activist artist community organizer educator and human rights defender. She has fought for sex worker migrant gender labor and racial justice for over twenty years She is the founder of Butterfly (Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network) and the cofounder of Migrant Sex Workers Project. She has used diverse and innovative approaches to advocate social justice for migrant sex workers such as leadership building and community mobilization. She holds a masters of law and masters of social work. She is a PhD candidate at McMaster University (School of Social Work) and is studying the harm of the anti-trafficking movement. She was awarded the Constance E. Hamilton Award for Womens Equality by the City of Toronto. Chanelle Gallant is an author activist and movement strategist who has worked in the areas of sexuality and criminalization for over two decades. Her writing has appeared in dozens of publications most recently the New York Times best-seller Pleasure Activism Beyond Survival and Defund Disarm Dismantle and her work has been discussed in the Washington Post the Advocate Esquire Vice and every national media outlet in Canada. Chanelle is on the national board for Showing Up For Racial Justice and has helped to found or support numerous sex worker organizations. She has an MA in sociology and was a Lambda Literary Fellow. Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013) and Border and Rule (2021). Trained in the law she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice anticapitalist feminist and anti-imperialist movements including No One Is Illegal and Women's Memorial March Committee. Robyn Maynard is an award-winning Black feminist scholar-activist based in Toronto and the author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present and co-author of Rehearsals for Living. She is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and her writings on policing feminism abolition and Black liberation are taught widely across North America and Europe.