Human Trafficking Research Lab @Augustana University

I have been having meetings with various stakeholders in South Dakota talking about the possibility of establishing a statewide human trafficking task force. Currently, the state has two separate task forces the East River Human Trafficking Task Force and the West River Human Trafficking Task Force. Both of these regional task forces are in different stages of development and continuity. Due to some issues with victim service organizations they have never unified and it has been the goal of Attorney General's  Office and the South Dakota Network Against Family Violence and Sexual Assault to start a statewide task force. During these meetings I being examples of research from the lab to show people the type of work that we do. One thing that I have been using in our meetings is a policy brief and article  Multi-Sector Human Trafficking Task Forces in the United States: Typologies and Overlapping Jurisdictions  published back in 2022. In that article we mapped 227 task forc...

I was fortunate to spend last week with 25 other Critical Language Scholarship alumni in Rīga, Latvia, for the Super Intelligence (SI) in Action CLS Alumni Seminar 2026. This is the third alumni seminar in 20 years of CLS programming and so I was very thankful to be one of the 25 alumni selected. Most of the alumni work in cutting-edge fields, from engineering and national security to research, law, and public policy and had very impressive resumes learning languages critical to US national security. We did sight visits with a number of SI and AI entities in Latvia including the Latvian Association for Artificial Intelligence, Agentic SI Tools, Latvijas Mobilais Telefons SIA, and even attended the conference Digitalization & Connectivity: Techritory 2026. Through hands-on learning, expert sessions and site visits, we were able to see how SI is shaping industries, strengthening security, and creating new opportunities for companies in Latvia. We also visited several univers...

October 18 was the European Union's Anti-Trafficking Day dedicated to raise awareness annually on trafficking in human beings in Europe. In commemoration of this day I attended an online panel discussion on the War & Trafficking: Lessons from Ukraine. The panel focused on human trafficking as a result of the war in Ukraine and how those lessons can transfer to other countries and future wars/conflicts. There was a definite emphasis on child trafficking and what experts had seen around Europe with vulnerabilities for human trafficking. The panelists believed Ukraine was a critical case study for how war has influenced trafficking dynamics as the largest war in Europe since WWII. Resiliency was a topic of discussion as Ukrainians are often referred to as such but many panelists said instead of just admiring Ukrainians saying they are resilient people should actually support Ukraine. This was an interesting take and so trued especially as support seems to be dwindling around Europ...

Since I have been meeting people around South Dakota I wanted to update our lab's impact report for 2026 so that I would have some updated information to give to people about our work. Our research will now shift to focusing on South Dakota but we are still hoping to publish the adjudication research which we submitted for publication with a second round of revisions. Also our Narrative Policy Framework article with data from Illinois will now be compared to South Dakota once I am able to hire a student at Augustana.  Since 2025, the lab has seen a sharp increase in visits to our website and also people reading our assessments which is great. We also received one large (for the lab donation) which I was able to transfer to Augustana and will be used to continue to support student salaries. We look forward to continuing our student-centered collaborative research work in South Dakota in the coming years.

I was asked to participate in an Online Seminar Series on Doing Gender and Politics Research in Challenging Times and Environments sponsored by the Standing Group on Gender and Politics at the  the European Consortium for Political Research. The overall goal of seminar series is discuss how feminist research can thrive in increasingly challenging environments offering a space for collective reflection on the practical, methodological, ethical, emotional, and political dimensions of conducting feminist research today. My talk will be on December and the panel is titled "Researching War Zones and Military Institutions: Reflexivity, Care and Safety." The series consist of four thematic sessions, each with three short talks and plenty of time for discussion and sharing of experiences showcasing the latest thinking in the study of environmental politics, delivered by group members and special guests, followed by a moderated discussion. Researching Hostile Environments and Actors:...

After finishing the literature review, adding the data from the interviews and putting the interview information into the methods sections, I sent the recruitment article off to my co-authors. It is nice to get another article sent out (in a way) since there is nothing more I can do without the Telegram data from my co-authors. Since my book is with the copy editor and I am waiting on chapter page proofs I have a little extra time to start some reading for another article based on our NSF study data.  In the interviews with Ukrainian victim service organizations we asked people about help seeking and referrals for social services during war. We believe that between the interview data, Telegram data and hotline data we have enough for a standalone article that can examine how people fleeing war access assistance for human trafficking. I started working on the literature review for this article which is a good first step to knowing what research is out there on how refugees access so...

Over the past few weeks I have been able to attend different events and meet anti-trafficking stakeholders in South Dakota. It is hard to start over again in a new state where people are not familiar with your work but having served on different task forces in Kansas, Georgia, and Illinois, I am confident that I can make some good connections for our research and for guest speakers in my human trafficking class. Last Tuesday I attended Call to Freedom's CommUNITY Breakfast and was able to listen to the Governor Larry Rhoden and Attorney General Marty Jackley speak about trafficking. The breakfast in Sioux Falls brought around 1200 other community members to raise awareness to the work of Call to Freedom a local anti-trafficking NGO in South Dakota. It was mainly a fundraiser but it was interesting to hear stories from a survivor who worked at Call to Freedom and see some of their work.  They had a slide that said that according to the National Human Trafficking Hotline in 2023...