Human Trafficking Research Lab @Millikin

The Access Georgian Exchange Alumni took time to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Georgia English Language Programs. Former Human Trafficking Research Lab Assistant Kocha Changelia plugged the lab and our research project during his presentation and this is a photo of his presentation. In Fall 2022, Kocha was UGRAD exchange student in Political Science at Millikin University while pursuing his degree in International Relations at the International Black Sea University in Tbilisi, Georgia. It's really great to see how international the lab has become because I was able to include students from the region that I study in my research.

Celebrations of Scholarship at Millikin University was today and two of my political science students gave research a presentation and a poster. One of the research assistants in the Human Trafficking Research Lab got an honorable mention for a poster on their poster on Human Trafficking from Arrest to Plea Deal in Central Illinois at the Judith & G. Richard Locke Poster Symposium! This poster symposium is dominated by much better funded hard sciences at Millikin with students who are Leighty Science Scholars and have years of research and summer research support while my students are funded through the grants and money that I fundraise or do independent studies and to get academic credit. I think this makes our honorable mention so much more notable and I am proud of their work Another student presented their senior thesis on Political Fair Use: The Impact of Political Campaigns and Individuals in Promoting Inconsistent Copyright Case Decisions. The students are going on to the Ha

The Senate passed a $60 billion aid package to Ukraine on Tuesday in a vote of 79-18 after the House  approved the package Saturday after months of stalling.  The initial aid package includes vehicles, Stinger air defense munitions, additional ammunition for high-mobility artillery rocket systems, 155mm artillery ammunition, TOW and Javelin anti-tank munitions and other weapons that can immediately be put to use on the battlefield.  This is the first major package for Ukraine since December 2022 and when I was in Ukraine in March many people asked me about the hold up in Congress and I could see and feel the ramifications of ammunition shortages. President Biden signed the bill on Wednesday and I was interviewed by WAND our local news station that day about what this aid means to Ukraine and my trip there in March. You can watch the segment on the news here . I am thankful for the opportunity to share my experience and they even mentioned my book (which is displayed in the background o

Last week I flew out to San Diego to give a talk on Human Trafficking Recruitment during Russia's War in Ukraine. I was able to give a guest lecture in a Human Trafficking class in the European Studies Department at San Diego State University. It was interesting to talk to a human trafficking class that was very knowledgeable about the topic on the border of the US with some of the students even crossing the border from Mexico to attend class.  Since the students in class has an entire semester's worth of knowledge on human trafficking but there were also other students and faculty from the university it presented a few complexities. You don't want the students in the class to be bored but you also want the people with no knowledge to understand the basic aspects of the talk. So I used this opportunity to have students from the human trafficking class teach other students the basics of human trafficking. Since my talk was focused on recruitment I also did my human trafficki

  As part of our final grant requirements with the Central Illinois Human Trafficking Task Force we are working on our final report documenting task force efforts. The final assessment will examine the performance of the taskforce over the grant period and our impact on Central Illinois in compliance with ECM goals. We will discuss the characteristics of human trafficking in Central Illinois and determine how we can use these data to strengthen and combat these trends through the task force in our region. We will investigate questions about task force needs; key geographic, demographic, and industry-specific vulnerabilities; effective prosecution tactics; and effective organizational strategies. In doing this we would like to assess the performance of the taskforce, identify potential areas of the community where sex and labor trafficking may be occurring, and areas for task force improvements.  Then we will supplement this survey data with the CIHTTF Facebook engagement data, CIHTTF w

After getting back from Ukraine I had about a week break to recuperate before I was out giving talks online in my home state of Minnesota talking to a colleagues class at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University about my recent trip to Ukraine, human trafficking, and conducting research during war. The students gathered a list of almost 40 questions for me based on an article I wrote on human trafficking and Russia's war in Ukraine. It was a great opportunity to talk about my trip and share my experiences good and bad about conducting research during war. Then on Wednesday one of my students and I went to give a talk about the Millikin Alumni House to our local PEO Chapter. The P.E.O. Sisterhood is a U.S.-based international women's organization with a primary focus on providing educational opportunities for female students. I spoke about human trafficking in Central Illinois and my student learned more about how I give talks about the lab. It was interesti

Recently, there has been a lot of interest in working in the lab as a research assistant which is great but sadly I can't take everyone! Now we have five research assistants working on three different projects (you can read their bios in our team members section here ). So, I decided that it would be good to track the different tasks how I track other tasks on my to do list with post-it notes. So I bought giant ones to go on the chalk board in the lab to help keep track of all the things we are working on and chart our progress during lab meetings. We will see how well it works when we are all gone for the summer but now every student has a giant post-it and we check things off when they complete them! Looking forward to charting so much productivity!