Congratulations to Prof. Jennifer Suchland, who has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure!

Professor Suchland is joint appointed in the Department of Slavic & East European Languages & Cultures, and the Department of Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. She joined the Ohio State faculty in Autumn 2008.

In her work, Prof. Suchland pursues an interdisciplinary approach to the study of rights, law and political discourses, with a particular interest in how rights-based categories emerge and evolve and what is at stake in those articulations. In her forthcoming book, Economies of Violence (Duke University Press), she examines the evolution of how women’s rights advocates, governments and intergovernmental organizations approached the problem of human trafficking during the Cold War and in its immediate aftermath.  Special attention is given to the entrance of trafficking victims from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc.  There is also an analysis on current anti-trafficking policy, research and government programs.  After the Cold War, the dominant way trafficking is understood is as a problem of violence against women and criminal behaviour – both of which support an anti-crime anti-trafficking agenda.  It is argued that current approaches to anti-trafficking lack serious attention to the economic dimensions of the problem. Human trafficking is not viewed as part of the wider global phenomenon of precarious labor.  The book examines why this is the case and suggests alternatives to consider for the future.