Human Trafficking Research Lab @Millikin

Very recently, I was responsible for what I deemed to be my first “big” job as a member of the research lab team as part of the Central Illinois Human Trafficking Task Force. Dr. Dean had me edit the Human Trafficking Vulnerability Assessment in Central Illinois and it was honestly really fun. I was excited to do something like this because I really haven’t ever done a professional job like this and it not be for a school assignment. The editing was pretty seamless honestly, with just a comma here, a hyphen there, and maybe putting “are” where it originally said “is”. All in all, it was straightforward, easy to do, and rewarding to finish. It was also kind of surreal to see something I had worked on included in the vulnerability assessment.  Once the edits were completed we presented our findings to the Central Illinois Human Trafficking Task Force in one of our general membership meetings. The presentation was pretty neat too! I never have done a presentation outside of a classroom se

Last weekend I went up to Chicago for the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Conference. This is a picture of me presenting my paper on human trafficking as an outcome of Russia's war in Ukraine on a panel War in Ukraine: Displacement, Health Services, and Human Trafficking. The research focused on the characteristics of human trafficking, conditions that create vulnerabilities in war, and prevention tools used to combat human trafficking in war. It analyzes and compares three different periods of anti-trafficking work in Ukraine before 2013, 2014-2021, and 2022 as a within-case study comparison of three time periods. Human trafficking is recognized as an outcome of war throughout history in wars across the globe and based on my significant research on human trafficking in Ukraine before the 2022, I wanted to discuss my different observations as a result of the full-scale invasion. I always take the train up to Chicago since then I can work on the train on