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PROJECT UPDATE

PROJECT UPDATE

Following our successful Symposium in September, at which we shared our findings and hosted prominent researchers, practitioners and experts, we set about working on our other planned avenues of dissemination for our research into the representation of transnational human trafficking.

Our efforts soon bore fruit:  in November we were offered a book contract by Palgrave.  We are very pleased to have been awarded additional funding by ESRC to publish this Palgrave Pivot book Open Access.  Open Access will no doubt increase its impact and outreach to a wider audience of readers, which we consider to be very important and at the heart of our project's rationale.

Our book is entitled Representations of Transnational Human Trafficking:  Present-day News Media, True Crime, and Fiction. It is a collection of essays by project investigators Dr Christiana Gregoriou, Dr Charlotte Beyer, Dr Melissa Dearey, and Dr Nina Muždeka and research assistant Dr Ilse Ras. The book is going into production imminently.  Further news updates will follow here in due course, but the details of the book can be found on the publisher's page here .

Another method of dissemination which we have worked on, and which is now completed, is our Policy Brief. This document describes our project findings, and lists our recommendations. PaCCs very kindly produced a flipbook for us. We hope this Policy Brief will be useful to practitioners, researchers and experts, as well as wider readerships. The link to our Policy Brief can be found on the PaCCs website here .

Dr Charlotte Beyer

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Dr Nina Muždeka explains what she will examine in her research

As a complex issue, transnational human trafficking invites  debate facilitated by the role of media as both a contemporary watchdog and a modern forum for showcasing diverse viewpoints. In the analysis of the transnational human trafficking coverage in the news media within the domain of narrative theory and the theoretical framework of poststructuralism, the following two aspects appear to be crucial: (1)  The role of news media, as a forum for expressing different opinions in relation to the causes and solutions to human trafficking, in the construction of public opinion and response to the issue, as well as in the formation and implementation of policy on human trafficking, exemplified by the choices they make in reporting on the issue, and (2)  The application of the contemporary narrative theory to the analysis of news media texts as means to construct meaning and reality, which details and explains the importance of the process of story-telling and the structural elements

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