In response to COVID-19, Carleton University swiftly developed an internal funding opportunity to provide seed funding for individuals or teams of researchers for original, innovative, and time-sensitive research to propose solutions to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, or to apply to external research grant competitions targeting the COVID-19 pandemic. The research had to have the potential to contribute to the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, or to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and/or its negative consequences on people and communities. The grant was open to all full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members.
Carleton Office for Research Initiatives and Services announced the recipients of the Covid-19 Rapid Research Response Grants.
Dr. Megan Rivers-Moore’s successful grant proposal is entitled “Corona virus, sex work, and mutual aid in Latin America”
Sex workers in Latin America are some of the most precarious and vulnerable workers in a region already defined by high levels of informal labour. This project explores how they are experiencing and responding to the coronavirus pandemic. Paying attention to the ways that sex workers in Latin America have practiced mutual aid, and how their efforts to practice collective care have shifted during the current crisis, will provide a useful example of how marginalized groups respond to complex social problems. Centring the perspectives and knowledges of those most discounted, oppressed, and disempowered within current social relations, this research explores the ways Latin American sex workers’ mutual aid strategies have shifted during the coronavirus crisis, and aims to record and disseminate their practices because they hold key lessons that are useful to other marginalized groups in the global south and beyond.
Dr. Megan Rivers-Moore is associate professor at the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton University. She is a member of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Steering Committee.