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The Project Team

See listing on Research Council UK's page

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR:



Dr Christiana Gregoriou is an English Language lecturer at Leeds University’s School of English. She is a specialist in crime fiction stylistics, and employs critical linguistic analysis to the study of crime fiction, but also other crime-related discourse (including media texts and the true crime genre). She is currently exploring adaptations for her third monograph, contracted with Bloomsbury: Crime Fiction Migration: Crossing Languages, Media, Cultures (forthcoming 2017).


CO-INVESTIGATORS:


Dr Charlotte Beyer, Senior Lecturer in English Studies at University of Gloucestershire.  I am a contemporary literature specialist, with a background in gender and women's studies. My scholarship concerns itself with primarily with crime fiction and ethical and gender-political questions explored the genre.  My forthcoming edited book, Teaching Crime Fiction (contracted with Palgrave) examines crime fiction teaching and learning.  I am also active in motherhood studies and am co-editing two books for Demeter Press.  



Dr Melissa Dearey, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Hull. My academic background is in philosophy and cultural theory, and I am particularly interested in the links between deviance, art/aesthetics and social change. My published research has focused on the analysis of popular cultural forms like dance, auto/biography, true crime, reality tv, game shows, music videos, prisoner writing, etc. My current teaching and research are in the areas of cultural criminology, true crime, evil and green criminology.



Dr Nina Muzdeka, Assistant Professor of English and American Literature, University of Novi Sad, Serbia.   Nina's research interests are contemporary British literature, genre theory, narratology, magic(al) realism, literary translation.  



Ilse RasPostgraduate Research Assistant. I am currently completing my PhD at the University of Leeds on the topic of representations of corporate fraud. I’m a corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analyst and have research interests in language and power, particularly in the role of (news) media in crime and the criminal justice system. I have an MSc in Criminology from the University of Leicester and am particularly interested in white-collar, corporate, and organised crime. I am furthermore the co-founder of the Crime Writing Special Interest Group at the international Poetics and Linguistics Association conference.
  
Bernie Gravett, Specialist Policing Consultancy. Bernie Gravett is the director of Specialist Policing Consultancy Ltd.  which delivers consultancy services and training to UK and European law enforcement agencies. Bernie Gravett is also a Senior EU expert in combating transnational organised crime and human trafficking.  Specialist Policing Consultancy Ltd is partners with a number of organisations, including Anti-Slavery International and ECPAT UK.  Bernie Gravett was previously  employed as Police Superintendent for the Metropolitan Police, and has a long track record  in the investigation, supervision and direction of serious and complex criminal investigations, both in the UK and overseas.
  

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Dr Nina Muždeka explains what she will examine in her research

As a complex issue, transnational human trafficking invites  debate facilitated by the role of media as both a contemporary watchdog and a modern forum for showcasing diverse viewpoints. In the analysis of the transnational human trafficking coverage in the news media within the domain of narrative theory and the theoretical framework of poststructuralism, the following two aspects appear to be crucial: (1)  The role of news media, as a forum for expressing different opinions in relation to the causes and solutions to human trafficking, in the construction of public opinion and response to the issue, as well as in the formation and implementation of policy on human trafficking, exemplified by the choices they make in reporting on the issue, and (2)  The application of the contemporary narrative theory to the analysis of news media texts as means to construct meaning and reality, which details and explains the importance of the process of story-telling and the structural elements

Principal Investigator Dr Christiana Gregoriou on her research

As principal investigator of the project, I am analysing English print media-specific human trafficking representation. The analysis is critical discourse analytic and qualitative. For this part of the project, a sample corpus needed to be extracted from the large English language media text corpus (of around 80,000 texts) Ilse Ras’s research method generated (http://representinghumantrafficking.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/ilse-ras-reports-on-her-research-on.html). We looked at graph spikes where large numbers of these human trafficking-related texts were generated; from the 2000-2016 period, the sample corpus texts were hence limited to the periods of April 2001, March 2007, November 2013, Summer 2015 and May 2016. Employing Laurence Anthony’s ProtAnt software so as to trace prototypical corpus texts within these spikes enabled the generation of a sample corpus of a manageable set of 67 news texts of various length and spike-distribution. The literature review around human trafficking

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My role in the project is to collect and analyse a corpus of British newspaper articles, published between 2000 and 2016, on the topic of human trafficking. A corpus is nothing more than a collection of texts, and corpus linguistics is the field that uses corpora (the plural of corpus) to draw conclusions about language use. Collecting corpora is not always a straightforward endeavour, in particular when the topic under investigation is sometimes misunderstood by the public, the media, and even legislators. For instance, human trafficking may also be known as ‘modern slavery’, and may encompass such crimes such as organ harvesting, forced labour, and domestic servitude. Furthermore, there is an ongoing debate about whether sex work should always be considered a form of exploitation and trafficking. Finally, it may not always be clear whether someone has been trafficked (i.e. moved using coercion or deception for the purposes of exploitation), or smuggled (i.e. voluntarily but ir