![]() Eventually, they decided to work with me, with a very important caveat: “We would be happy to grant your request but we are careful not to have this construed as a benevolent action on your part.” The Collective rejected the common paternalistic motivations behind attempts to research sex work in the Philippines: they did not want to be “enlightened” or “saved” – either by Filipino or foreign “experts”. This was not in line with the lived experiences of their members: sex work was significantly better than their realistic alternatives the stigma and criminalisation of sex work are what heightened their precarity and they were significantly more threatened by the police than their clients and third parties. The Collective’s first objection was to the amenability of some feminist scholarship to carceral logics and restrictions on women’s freedom: sex work was regularly represented as a crime of men against women that could be solved through policing, stricter migration regulations, rescue operations, and rehabilitation of “victims”. ![]() By sharing some of their concerns and the complexity of my methodological journey, I hope to contribute to thinking about how to undertake more ethical and transformative research on sex work. In my initial encounters with the leaders of the Collective, they made clear their lack of trust in feminist academics, researchers, and journalists. Today, I would like to talk about decolonising sex work research based on my own experience of collaborative research with the Philippine Sex Workers Collective, a loose alliance of sex workers in the Philippines advocating for decriminalisation. It also de facto exports the US carceral model for sex work to the rest of the world. The US government’s requirement that all recipients of its funding for foreign anti-trafficking or HIV projects and programmes commit to an anti-prostitution position shrinks spaces for sex workers to advocate for themselves, conduct research, and build political agency ( Chuang 2010: 1684). This credibility deficit is a form of epistemic injustice ( Fricker, 2007) that removes their ability to influence how they are represented and the interventions carried out ostensibly to “help” them. Additionally, sex workers are often systematically excluded from scholarly and policy conversations through a variety of discursive maneuvers, such as pathologising discourses that construct them as “too damaged or traumatised to be credible”. Within popular discourse, sex work is represented through sensationalist and racialised portrayals of suffering ( Andrijasevic, 2014). The extractive dimensions of academic research are heightened for stigmatised groups such as sex workers, who are an over-researched population across many disciplines but massively underrepresented in academia and even within mainstream social movements. This results in epistemic advantages that accumulate over time. Western academic institutions have benefitted not just from the flow of profits from colonies, but also from their epistemic location which affords them the ability to extract from the archives and experiences of peoples “outside” the West to generate “expertise” ( Gopal, 2021). There is always a degree of objectification and “speaking about” (or “speaking for”) others that occurs. Even with the best of intentions, all research involves extracting from the Other to “produce knowledge”. As the strike resumes, we stand in solidarity – and ask for yours – with our colleagues at universities across the UK and workers beyond academia, who struggle for better, more equal futures for all.Īcademic research is inevitably implicated in extractive processes. Our archive joins existing initiatives like the LSE Strike Diaries in ‘collective memory making and memory preserving’ of our historic industrial action. In it, we publish teach-outs delivered by our friends and colleagues at the LSE Department of Gender Studies in December 2021, as they withdrew their labour from the LSE in the first week of the strike against casual work, crushing workloads, pay cuts, gender, disability and racial wage gaps and pension cuts. This piece is a part of our Strike Archive, the only content we will be publishing throughout the UCU strike in February and March 2022.
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