OSINT Clinic - Using open source investigations to detect and document slavery

Evidence of slavery in war is increasingly visible online. The OSINT Clinic is the Centre’s dedicated space for finding that material, collecting it, and building it into evidence the Centre can use. The Clinic recruits students to conduct open source investigations into questions arising from the Centre’s research, to construct and maintain the datasets those investigations produce, and to feed both back into the Centre’s four research strands. 

Open source material allows the Centre to observe practices as they unfold, including in places and contexts that are otherwise underreported. The Clinic’s work spans conflict settings including Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ukraine. 

Students join the Clinic as OSINT Fellows. Fellows work in small investigative teams and contribute to live investigations across the Clinic’s workstreams. The Clinic is currently in its pilot phase. Our inaugural cohort of ten Fellows was recruited in spring 2026 and is running through the summer, testing what student-led open source investigation can deliver for the Centre and what structures it requires to do so well. A second cohort will begin in January 2027. 

Inaugural cohort of OSINT Fellows, 2026
Joseph Blondin-Diop · Sarah Borden · Lok Chit Cheng · Merina Gigi · Eva Lopez De Pablo Bricca · Elena Morresi · Diane Regrain · Divyam Sharma · Sia Vourkoutiotis · Ewan White 

Dr Franka Pues