Human Trafficking Research Lab @Augustana University

On January 18th 2022, I accompanied Dr. Laura Dean, Millikin students, and community members to the Decatur City Council meeting. The purpose of our visit to the city council was to read the Human Trafficking Awareness Month Declaration, I was lucky enough to be designated to read it for the whole council and broadcast live on public access television around the city. Since 2010, the President of the United States has dedicated the month of January as human trafficking awareness month. The month in geared towards general education events with the public on how to identify and help prevent these crimes both domestically and abroad.  Unfortunately, the population of Decatur has little knowledge on human trafficking so having the proclamation of Human Trafficking Awareness Month being read in the City Council is a great opportunity for city’s population to learn about this crime. This is because the city hall meetings are broadcasted on local TV public access channels which helps spre...

All of the details are set for our annual Human Trafficking Awareness Month talk. Every year we pick a different theme to cover regarding human trafficking and with the emphasis on education and training lately we thought this would be a good to discuss. This is the fifth year of our panel discussion and we are bringing in educators and trainers on human trafficking from Peoria, Bloomington, and Decatur. We will discuss prevailing pedagogies on human trafficking, challenges to teaching about this hidden crime and how to combat disinformation through educational opportunities. The panel discussion is sponsored by the Set Free Movement-Macon County and the Department History and Political Science at Millikin University. We are thankful for our wonderful advocates and educators in Central Illinois who take time out of their busy schedules to come and speak with Millikin students and the community. Panelists: Matthew Fuller Human Trafficking Training Specialist, Center for Prevention o...

Last semester I was enrolled in Dr. Dean’s Human Trafficking class, as well as working for the research lab. At the end of the semester, our final project was to make Millikin a slavery free campus as a class. This project was one I was very excited for since Dr. Dean told us about it in the beginning of the semester. To start the project, our class began to brainstorm about the different groups on our campus that may be unknowingly contributing to slavery. Once we had these groups, apparel, food service, human resources, and administration, we each signed up for the group that we wanted to investigate.  I signed up for the administration group, and we began to brainstorm who we should speak with on our campus. We used the University of Nottingham’s “The Slavery-Free Campus: A blueprint for university action against modern slavery” to begin our brainstorming. We decided that the most effective way to do this project would be to schedule interviews the head of Public Safety, the dir...

The Community Assessment for the Central Illinois Human Trafficking Task Force is completed and available to read here .   The Human Trafficking Research Lab at Millikin would like to thank all the Central Illinois Human Trafficking Task Force members who took time to fill out this survey and provide a valuable evaluation for the future of the task force. We would especially like to thank Sara Sefried and Matt Fuller and other Steering Committee members who provided valuable feedback in the pretest versions of the community assessment survey. The survey was administered in Qualtrics and we would like to thank Linda Collinsworth and the Behavioral Sciences Department at Millikin University for their assistance gaining access to this software. The statistical analyses were performed in Stata12, the network analysis was constructed with NodeXL, the maps were formulated in Tableau 2018, and the frequency analysis and qualitative coding were constructed MAXQDA 2020. Respondent...

We have been working this summer and fall to create a new Social Science Research Lab space open to all social science students for collaborative research. We got a new paint job and table, decorated the bulletin boards, displayed the door decal, and hung the cork boards and research posters. The aim of the space is to promote student and faculty collaborative research and to highlight the work of the Human Trafficking Research Lab and other labs to come. Research posters, peer-reviewed articles, and research in progress are featured to show the research process and show prospective students the work we do at Millikin. Stay tuned for more updates to our collaborative space for undergraduate research!

The Human Trafficking Research Lab at Millikin was asked to table at our local Walk for Freedom on October 16, 2021.  The walk is put on globally by the A21 Campaign and consisted of a 1.5 mile "silent" walk raising awareness to human trafficking in Central Illinois and beyond. The walk started at the Old State Capitol in Springfield Illinois.  Here are some photos of of the Human Trafficking Research Lab table where we provide information about the lab, highlight our research with undergraduate students, and hand out fair trade chocolate. I was also asked to be a speaker this year and I told the story of how I became interested in the issue of human trafficking and my work on the issue in Latvia, Ukraine, and Russia.

I was inspired to write an article about my experience working with students in the Human Trafficking Research Lab for the latest issue of Anti-trafficking Review on Anti-Trafficking Education and the article entitled "Pedagogical Approaches to Human Trafficking Through Applied Research Laboratories" was finally published (after four rounds of revisions) in September 2021. In the article I argue that human trafficking is a phenomenon that lends itself to hands-on pedagogical practices and undergraduate research that, in turn, can create localised knowledge with anti-trafficking stakeholders. Research labs focused on human trafficking are one-on-one or small group applied research settings that build a bridge between the university and anti-trafficking stakeholders over multiple semesters. In this paper, I argue that one way of involving students in the anti-trafficking field is through research laboratories, like the Human Trafficking Research Lab (HTRL) at Millikin Universit...