Sharvari Karandikar, professor and associate dean of academic affairs in the College of Social Work, was awarded a 2023-2024 Fulbright U.S. Specialist grant to address the issues of human trafficking, human rights, and migration alongside researchers and scholars from the University of Coimbra in Portugal.
From October 25 to November 9, 2023, Karandikar will conduct multiple workshops on migration, human rights, and human trafficking, global sex work and sex trafficking, and qualitative research methodology for students, postdocs, and senior researchers from the field of law, social work and other social sciences.
Additionally, Karandikar will collaborate with researchers from the University of Coimbra Institute for Legal Research (UCILeR) and stakeholders and partners from the local communities to develop and design collaborative, community-engaged research on the understanding of the patterns and forms of human trafficking specifically related to immigrant and refugee communities in Portugal.
Karandikar's community-engaged work promotes the well-being of minoritized and marginalized women living on fringes of the society. To attain this goal, Karandikar has focused on understanding the lived experiences and expressions of resilience and agency among sex workers, victims, survivors of sex trafficking, surrogate mothers, and egg donors. Karandikar has conducted research with refugees and immigrant populations in Central Ohio and offered methodological expertise through rigorous qualitative data collection methods and analytic techniques.
The Fulbright Specialist Program is administered by World Learning and is sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State.
For more information about the Fulbright Specialist Program, contact Joanna Kukielka-Blaser.