2024-2025 Academic Catalog

Dec 11, 2024

2024-2025 Academic Catalog

ID 235 - Trafficking: Globalization and Its Illicit Commodities

This course turns a critical eye towards the different cultural, political, and economic processes that make contemporary forms of “trafficking” possible. It examines these transnational processes from three different vantage points, each composing one part of the course as a whole. Part one will engage many of the key concepts that inform the existing literature on “trafficking” (e.g. commodification, shadow economies, transnational criminal networks, and regulatory authority) to explore both their assumptions and their limits. Special attention is focused on the ways scholars, policymakers, and activists have historically constructed trafficking as a “problem” either for analysis or action, and how the different legal and policy frameworks created to combat it have changed over recent decades. Part two examines the above concerns in greater detail through a series of case-studies on different forms of human trafficking, the global market for organs, genetic information, animal parts, and endangered species, among others. Part three will consider some of the opportunities and dilemmas (theoretical, methodological and ethical) such practices present for those who wish to study, to manage, or to advocate on behalf of those affected by different forms of trafficking.