DIIS researcher awarded prestigious grant

The grants are awarded within the framework of the Danish Council for Independent Research’s Sapere Aude programme. The purpose of this programme is to provide gifted researchers with the best career conditions, to enable them to deliver stand-out research results at a high international level. This year one of the grants is given to Sine Plambech from DIIS for her project on human trafficking and sex work migration.

About the project

Sex work migration and human trafficking into the EU has received mounting attention and is seen as one of the major societal challenges. Yet, despite the attention given to the vulnerabilities of women migrants upon arrival to the EU, the question is how EU migration controls itself and these types of migrations influence the communities in the Global South from where women’s migration to the EU continues to be rampant. Contemporary critical trafficking studies furthermore argue that the precise point at which tolerable forms of sex work migration end and human trafficking begins will vary according to political and moral values not easily captured by legal definitions.

This project investigates these questions by exploring how sex work migration and human trafficking are practiced, perceived and have impacted two communities in Thailand and Nigeria over time. The project is based at DIIS and form part of an international, interdisciplinary research network on Gender, Justice and Neoliberal Transformations at Columbia University in New York. Besides the empirical and theoretical outputs in articles and at conferences, drawing on applicant’s previous experience, a documentary film will be produced, with the aim of disseminating the research results to a broader audience.