From Commoditizing to Commodifying Human Rights: Research on Forced Labor in Dominican Sugar Production

Related by distinct, commoditization happens when human rights is distributed in forms that mimic commodity merchandising, while commodification occurs when human rights information becomes a commodity, subject to intellectual property restrictions. I recount a story of the transition from commoditization to commodification, in which an allegation of contemporary slavery in Dominican Republic sugar production attains greater visibility and verisimilitude through what Bolter and Grusin term “remediation,” the repeated transfer of a message from one activist communications medium to another. The allegation moves from independent video, to journalistic coverage, to inclusion in a U.S. government-produced global human rights index, and is then outsourced by the government for further fact-finding, “offshored” for investigation, and the knowledge thus produced ultimately repatriated for processing by the contractor. Distortions and inequities follow, reminiscent of those produced by global supply chains, including the alienation of the Dominican field investigators from control of the knowledge they produced.