Denkraum Ukraine Talk

I was asked to present my research project "Identifying Potential Human Trafficking Recruitment during Humanitarian Disasters and Russia’s War in Ukraine" with colleagues from Worcester Polytechnic Institute while I am here in Regensburg as a Visiting Fellow at the The Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS). The event was sponsored by the Leibniz Science Campus Regensburg, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS), Regensburg, University of Regensburg, “Denkraum Ukraine” / “Think Space Ukraine” funded by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) with funds from the Federal Foreign Office (AA).

We only had a week to put the event together but I had a great turnout and discussion on our research project. I explored some preliminary findings from our dataset on online recruitment technologies during the first 1.5 years of the war consisting of:
  • 482,000 collected and cleaned online posts from Telegram channels
  • Interview data from Ukrainian anti-trafficking organizations (7 in person, 3 virtual)
  • 18 months of call data from 88,939 phone calls to Ukraine's anti-trafficking and migration support hotline.
I also received good comments to help us work through some of the questions we had matching up call increases to the hotline with key events from the war. Also at the end instead of clapping the audience knocked on the table which apparently is a German custom in academic settings since the 18th century. I am glad I had the opportunity to share my research and also I am very thankful for the opportunity to be here in Germany as a visiting fellow to work on my research full time. 

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