Dr Charlotte Beyer presents paper at international conference

An opportunity recently arose for me to test out some of my ideas and findings by speaking to an audience of crime fiction researchers and scholars, and it turned out to be immensely useful.  On 26-27 May 2017, I attended the International Crime Genre Research Group’s 7th biennial conference, entitled “Networks and Connections in the Crime Genre”, at National University of Ireland, in Galway.  I only took part in the Friday programme of the conference, but as can be seen from the programme, which can be accessed here, the whole conference was rich in interesting research and ideas. Read more about the work done by the International Crime Genre Research Group here.

The “Networks and Connections” conference proved a very useful venue for meeting other academics working in the field of crime studies.  As the conference organisers stated about the aims of their research group: “Our founding ambition since our first conference in 2005 is to bring together researchers from a broad range of areas to see what points of commonality emerge when we share our perspectives.”  The Call for Papers included topics such as “Criminal gangs, people trafficking, drug cartels, the movement and influence of global capital, collaboration between national police forces in investigating crime.”

I gave a paper at the conference, presenting some of my research findings in relation to the PaCCS project.  My paper was entitled “Depictions of human trafficking in contemporary crime fiction,” and was based on discussions surrounding two crime texts, Stuart Neville’s 2011 novel Stolen Souls, and the Nordic Noir crime short story “Women in Copenhagen” by Danish author Naja Marie Aidt, also from 2011.  In the paper, I presented research related to the PaCCS project, and examined some of the questions surrounding the possibilities and limitations posed by crime fiction in terms of its capacity, not merely to representing human trafficking, but also to educating readers about this complex crime.  Having worked on material exploring ideas surrounding sex trafficking and its representation for this particular paper, I was pleased with the responses and interest shown by the conference delegates.

I enjoyed listening to all the fascinating and diverse papers presented at the conference. In terms of relevance for our PaCCS project, I was mainly interested in hearing the other papers examining representations of human trafficking and gang criminality and violence. Here, Angela Kimyongür (Hull): “Beyond the French Connection: criminal and other networks in Dominique Manotti’s Or Noir (2015)”, and Michael Kelly (UL): “Summoning the System. Crime Fiction as Cognitive Mapping” were especially interesting - Kimyongür’s paper because it discussed the capacity of crime fiction to be used politically as a tool for social and cultural critique; and Kelly’s paper because it approached crime fiction in spatial terms which is rather useful in terms of thinking about the organisation of human trafficking as a glocal phenomenon and configuring the symbolic and geographical landscapes which harbour that crime.  

Equally, the other two papers on my panel, Eoin McCarney (DCU): “Beyond Borders: Illegal Trafficking, Criminality and the State in Irish and Mexican Crime Fiction and Narcoliterature”; and Andrew Pepper (QUB): “Markets and Violence in Contemporary Crime Fiction”, presented fascinating discussions of various dimensions of representing human trafficking and violence.

The Friday keynote address by Eilis Ward, entitled: “Trafficking Tales, Facts and Fictions: a view from the social sciences” was extremely interesting and relevant to human trafficking research, particularly concerning the issue of gender, trafficking and representation of sexual exploitation in the media.  Eilis Ward discussed, among other things, research from her recent volume Feminism, Prostitution and the State: The Politics of Neo-Abolitionism (Routledge, 2017), which she co-edited with Gillian Wylie.

I was fascinated to hear about the different critical angles and opinions regarding representations of human trafficking and organised crime in the various papers at the conference.  The prominence and complexity of this topic seemed to me to demonstrate, once again, the relevance and pertinence of our own project, and the many ways in which our research concerns reflect and complement other emerging research happening in the field of crime studies.