ADSS Work-in-Progress Seminar #2

Seminar held on 10th June 2021

Tracking and Exposing Online Trafficking in Human Remains within its Socio-Cultural Context

This presentation summarizes ongoing research occurring within the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded The Bone Trade Project (https://bonetrade.github.io/). In general, this project is beginning to identify and map the online human remains trade across various social media and e-commerce platforms. As a summary presentation, I will highlight key points of methods from the digital humanities and machine learning used to investigate how this collecting community functions, what we can ‘remotely’ know of their complex morals and ethics, how they negotiate a complex legal landscape, and from which populations the human remains trafficked possibly originate. I will conclude by highlighting research areas into which we hope to collaboratively expand this work and how it is relevant in general to understanding society’s engagement with death and the dead in its most complete form.

Presenter

Dr Damien Huffer was most recently a postdoctoral fellow (2017-19) within the Osteoarchaeological Research Laboratory, Department of Archaeology & Classical Studies, Stockholm University. From 2014-16, he held the Stable Isotope Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute, and he received his PhD in Osteoarchaeology from the ANU in 2013. He is currently an honourary adjunct research professor in the Department of History, Carleton University, and an honourary research affiliate of UQ's School of Social Science.