Academics

Hello! This is my first blog post and I am going to talk about my experience as a new Odyssey Scholar for the past two months.

The first thing I did in August was come up with a research question. It had to sum up the entire two years as a question to answer. I came up with this. How do survivors of sex trafficking in the United States cope with their psychological trauma and how do organizations support their recovery? How can these experiences be artistically represented through visual arts? After I was done with my research question, I started writing my elevator pitch. I gave an elevator pitch to my family and community about my project. I am doing a project on researching human sex trafficking mainly in the United States and creating a series of artworks to represent what I have learned. As I wrote it, I had to talk about who I am, and introduce myself in a way that captures my identity as a Scholar. I talked about the goals and overall mission of my project, the value of my research, and how I’m contributing to the sex trafficking prevention field and my community. Public speaking was a huge challenge I had to learn to overcome when presenting my elevator pitch. I had to practice over and over again to even present it to the 9 people in the classroom. Eventually though, I was confident enough to stand up and get it over with. As I was speaking, I surprisingly found myself enjoying talking to everyone about what I am so passionate about. That was the first type of speech I have had to do like that in my life, but now I feel much better about having to do things like that in the future. After the elevator pitch was over, I started researching and collecting sources on Jstor to put in my annotated bibliography. I ended up finding this source called “Trafficking and Security in the North American Arctic” by Mike Perry that I was really interested in. The report estimated that up to 30 percent of young people in Nunavut could be victims of trafficking, and there have been documented reports of Inuit

families being offered CA$15,000–20,000 for their underage daughters. I had no clue that the Arctic is actually a big topic in the human trafficking conversation. I thought of the north as this barren icy landscape with hardly any crime, but that is very much not the case. Here is a quote from the article that absolutely shocked me. “Homeless youth in Anchorage, Alaska have been identified as being disproportionately vulnerable to trafficking, and the results of a study last year in 10 US and Canadian cities revealed Anchorage as having the highest prevalence of trafficked homeless youth in the United States.” That is what I found the most surprising while researching these past two months. I also created my year plan, which I am going to use to keep myself organized and get me to stay on track. Being an Odyssey Scholar has already pushed me beyond my comfort zone so much, and I really look forward to continuing my research and artistic representation of such an important topic.