Advisory Board Member
Professor of Criminology – Northumbria University
Tanya holds a PhD in criminology from University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. She also holds a Master’s in Criminology and Criminal Justice from Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, Michigan. She is a Professor of Criminology in the Department of Social Sciences at Northumbria University.
A UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Tanya has been a visiting researcher for the Australian Research Council-funded ‘Transnational Environmental Crime Project’ at the Australian National University and for the Norwegian Research Council-funded ‘Criminal justice, wildlife conservation and animal rights in the Anthropocene (CRIMEANTROP)’ at the University of Oslo.
Tanya is a green criminologist using a species justice approach to explore the victimisation and offending occurring throughout the stages of the illegal wildlife trade. Much of her research unpacks the intersections of wildlife trafficking and other green crimes with organised crime, corporate crime, and corruption. He is interested in how practices in these parks relate to the colonial history of conservation and to post-independence political, developmental and security concerns.
Her current project is UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Follow-on-Funding to investigate the implications and practicalities of making wildlife trafficking a fourth protocol to the UN Convention on Transnational Organised Crime and how wildlife can be rendered invisible when excluded from legal definitions.
For more information about Tanya’s research you can visit her academic profile. Tanya is also on Twitter as @DrTWyatt.
What’s drawn you to the project and why do you think our research matters/is relevant/important/timely?
The Beastly Business Project is one of the few research studies to look at Europe’s role in the illegal wildlife trade. As someone who has been saying for the last several years, that Europe (along with the US) need to address the demand for and consumption of wildlife that is taking place in their own borders, this was a project that I definitely wanted to be a part of. The findings are bound to affect wildlife regulation in Europe and hopefully, spark changes in behaviour and attitudes of people in Europe that wildlife trafficking is a crime taking place elsewhere.