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Our upcoming symposium

Over the last few months we have been busy planning our Symposium. Herewith the latest details of the event:

This one-day symposium is held by our PACCS (Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research) ESRC-funded project on ‘Representation of Transnational Human Trafficking in Present-Day news media, true crime, and fiction’? The symposium will take place on September the 12th 2017 in Leeds. It will commence with registration at 9.30 am followed by the opening address at 10 am. Information on the venue can be found here. Carriageworks is in the heart of Leeds city centre with excellent links to public transport, and with several large car parks nearby.


The symposium will showcase some of our project partners’ research results (with findings split across the genres of newstexts, crime fiction, and true crime documentaries), welcomes feedback from participants, and features a group of especially invited speakers:

  • Police and Crime Commissioner for West Yorkshire and Chair of the National Anti-Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery Network Mark Burns-Williamson
  • crime fiction writer Matt Johnson
  • journalist/writer/film-maker Paul Kenyon 
  • academic/writer/Free the Slaves co-founder Professor Kevin Bales. 


We will be joined by practitioners, academics and policy makers investigating the ways in which transnational human trafficking is portrayed across a range of influential text types, and what implications this portrayal has for policy-related response. Participants so far registered include academics, writers, filmmakers, police officers, and a range of human trafficking charity, institution, foundation, and media subject matter experts.

The symposium's last two events are a film screening of Nicola Mai's 'Travel' at 4:20 pm (followed by a Q and A with the filmmaker) and a book reading of an extract from Matt Johnson's 'Deadly Game' at 5.40 pm that day.
See also the publicity notification on N8 Policing Research Partnership
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