Media representations of trafficked women
My broad research interest is trafficking for sexual exploitation, which was also the topic of my Master's dissertation at Oxford University, where I studied police officers' perceptions of trafficked women. The study sought to problematise the binary between trafficked women's victimhood and agency, and I depart from the same idea in my current study. I am interested in sex trafficking as a range of genres and a specific politics of representation that relies on trafficked women as subjects of human suffering. I establish Luc Boltanski's politics of pity as a lens for analysing how different genres of media form discursive possibilities of meaning and problematise the gender and sexual roles ascribed to trafficked women with regard to their representation as sufferers.
Supervisor: Professor Lilie Chouliaraki
I completed my Bachelor's degree at the University of Toronto, specialising in Visual Culture and majoring in Art History, where I also worked as a research assistant. I then worked as a publications editor for a short film festival organised by the Canadian Film Centre before undertaking my first Master's degree in Media and Communications at the University of Helsinki. Led by my interest in interdisciplinary study of media and crime (especially human trafficking), I undertook a Master's degree in Criminology and Criminal Justice at Oxford University before arriving to LSE as a PhD researcher supported by the LSE PhD Studentship.