Trafficking transformations: objects as agents in transnational criminal networks
The Trafficking Transformations Project will use an innovative, multidisciplinary, object-centred framework to investigate the physical and contextual changes that illicit criminogenic collectables undergo during the trafficking process in three transnational criminal markets: antiquities, rare wildlife, and fossils. It will explore the socio-economic effects of the trafficked objects on participants in international criminal networks. It will transform organised crime research by shifting the focus of trafficking research away from criminals and networks of criminals toward following the objects of desire. 

Prior approaches to trafficking research cast trafficking as an interface between organised crime (people moving the objects) and white-collar crime (affluent people receiving goods); objects were not considered social agents in these networks. Trafficking Transformations pushes the boundaries of mainstream criminology, proposing an innovative object-centred understanding of trafficking networks, and exploring the ultimate question: How do objects cause crimes?

The project will use object biography, a multi-sited ethnography technique, to investigate the influences and transformations of trafficked criminogenic collectables in international illicit markets. Through data collection at multiple sites along trafficking pathways, the transformations of criminogenic collectables, the networks that they create, and the people they influence will form a narrative, a biography of trafficking. This will reveal the hidden lives of illicit commodities prior to their appearance as objects of conspicuous consumption in public markets, and holds the prospect of destabilising existing assumptions about the formulation, maintenance, and disruption of transnational criminal networks, transforming our understanding of organised crime.