Dr. Lara Lengel is a professor of communication at BGSU whose research focuses on international communication and gender in communication. She discusses her research on “Community Organizations’ Role in combating Sex Trafficking,” which she developed in Fall 2018 while an ICS Faculty Fellow. Specifically, Dr. Lengel focused on how Costa Rica has changed its laws around sex work, and the effects of that change on women, religious organizations, and human trafficking in the Americas.

Transcript:

Jolie Sheffer:                          Welcome to the BG Ideas podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, an associate professor of English and American culture studies and the director of ICS. Today I'm talking to Dr. Lara Martin Lengel, professor of communication here at BGSU. Dr. Lengel received her PhD in mass communication from Ohio University, and her research focuses on international communication and how communication can advance social, economic, and environmental justice, especially pertaining to gender and identity in a transnational context.

Jolie Sheffer:                          Some of her published work includes a study on memory around wartime sexual violence, and the use of social media for social change in the Middle East and North Africa. Dr. Lengel is an ICS faculty fellow in fall 2018. The ICS fellowship program allows full time faculty to take a full semester off from their research and service obligations to dedicate their attention to an interdisciplinary humanities topic of their choosing. At the end of the semester, fellows present their work publicly and hold a community engagement event that brings their knowledge to the wider community and in turn reinvigorates their academic research.

Jolie Sheffer:                          Dr. Lengel is here today to discuss the work she's performed during her semester long fellowship. While taking part in the fellowship, she studied the fraught relationship in Costa Rica between faith based organizations, FBOs, their efforts to abolish sex work and human trafficking and the government of Costa Rica's efforts to decriminalize sex work. I'm very pleased to welcome Dr. Lengel to the program as the second ICS faculty fellow speaking in our 2018-2019 speaker series. Thank you for joining me, Lara.

Dr. Lara Lengel:                    Thank you Jolie.

Jolie Sheffer:                          It's so great to have you here, and I wonder if you could just start us off by talking about how you first began working on the subject of sex work and human trafficking in Costa Rica in particular.

Dr. Lara Lengel:                    Thank you. It goes way back actually to my PhD research in North Africa. I had a Fulbright grant to spend a year in Tunisia, which is a small North African country on the Mediterranean, to look at the role of women in professional contexts, most notably music, in the country. I was very surprised to learn from numerous respondents that there is still a mythical connection between public performers of music, even serious music, classically trained in the Western music tradition and so forth, to prostitution. Because of that, many of the respondents who I came to know during that year, their parents, their brothers, their sisters, or their husbands, did not want them to be in a really respected organization, which is called El Azifet, which is the first all women's orchestra in the Arab world. This tremendous organization actually was missing key voices and instrumentations from women who were just not allowed to be in the organization.

Dr. Lara Lengel:                    I found this really perplexing, because there was absolutely no evidence that there was any contemporary connection between any woman getting on a public stage to sing or play the oud or