Representation of transnational human trafficking in present-day news media, true crime, and fiction

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

Over the last few months we have been busy planning our Symposium. Herewith the latest details of the event: This one-day symposium is held by our PACCS (Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research) ESRC-funded project on ‘Representation of Transnational Human Trafficking in Present-Day news media, true crime, and fiction’? The symposium will take place on September the 12th 2017 in Leeds . It will commence with registration at 9.30 am followed by the opening address at 10 am. Information on the venue can be found here . Carriageworks is in the heart of Leeds city centre with excellent links to public transport, and with several large car parks nearby. The symposium will showcase some of our project partners’ research results (with findings split across the genres of newstexts, crime fiction, and true crime documentaries), welcomes feedback from participants, and features a group of especially invited speakers: Police and Crime Commissioner for West Yorkshir

An opportunity recently arose for me to test out some of my ideas and findings by speaking to an audience of crime fiction researchers and scholars, and it turned out to be immensely useful.  On 26-27 May 2017, I attended the International Crime Genre Research Group’s 7th biennial conference, entitled “Networks and Connections in the Crime Genre”, at National University of Ireland, in Galway.  I only took part in the Friday programme of the conference, but as can be seen from the programme, which can be accessed  here , the whole conference was rich in interesting research and ideas. Read more about the work done by the International Crime Genre Research Group  here . The “Networks and Connections” conference proved a very useful venue for meeting other academics working in the field of crime studies.  As the conference organisers stated about the aims of their  research group : “Our founding ambition since our first conference in 2005 is to bring together researchers from a broad

We are planning to hold a Symposium to showcase the project and our findings, scheduled for September 2017. The one-day symposium held by the PACCS (Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research) ESRC-funded project on "Representation of Transnational Human Trafficking in Present-Day news media, true crime, and fiction" will take place on September the 12th 2017 .  The symposium will showcase some of our project partners’ research results (with findings split across the genres of newstexts, crime fiction, and true crime documentaries), and welcomes feedback from a group of especially invited participants.  Amongst these we are very pleased to welcome our three invited speakers: Crime fiction writer Ruth Dugdall ,  Journalist/writer/film-maker Paul Kenyon , Academic/writer/Free the Slaves co-founder Professor Kevin Bales .  We have also invited a number of practitioners, academics and policy makers who are investigating the ways in which transnational hum

My part of our research project examines the representation of transnational child trafficking in crime fiction from Britain, Ireland and Denmark.  The significance of investigating the nuances of these representations, and explore their capacity for contributing to a better public understanding and awareness of child trafficking, is becoming increasingly evident. Although recent work has recognised the particular vulnerability of women and children, the specific area of child trafficking and its representation has thus far received relatively little attention from critics and scholars, or the media. My research investigates the thematic and textual methods employed in twenty-first century crime fiction to portray transnational trafficking of children and young people. This involves a consideration of how texts incorporate existing and new information about transnational trafficking, how they represent differing kinds of trafficking, and the textual and thematic means by which th

I used slavery as one of the core search terms for my data collection (http://representinghumantrafficking.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/ilse-ras-reports-on-her-research-on.html). 2013 marked the 150 th anniversary of Lincoln’s signing of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves, so as a result of this anniversary and the use of this search term, there is a substantial number of articles in the human trafficking corpus discussing historical slavery, rather than contemporary human trafficking.   One definitional concern, therefore, is whether historical slavery, as in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and, in particular, the exploitation of African people on American plantations, could be considered a form of human trafficking. It certainly should be, if the principles of the Palermo Protocol are followed – historical slavery entailed the transnational movement of people, using coercion (in particular physical bondage and violence) as well as deception, for the purposes o