Megan Rivers-Moore awarded SSHRC Insight Development Grant
“Compañeras! Sex Worker Organizing in Latin America” is a two-year research project ($65,116) led by Megan Rivers-Moore (Carleton University) and Kate Hardy (University of Leeds), with the collaboration of Laura Macdonald (Carleton University).
In the face of significant changes to the political, legal, social, and cultural landscape in relation to the sex industry, sex workers around the world are organizing to improve their access to human and labour rights. The context in which sex workers struggle for rights remains deeply polarized. On the one hand, transnational organizations (including the International Labour Organization and Amnesty International) have increasingly adopted the perspective that sex workers are workers whose struggles should be addressed from a labour perspective. On the other hand, many jurisdictions have developed new policies and laws that conflate sex work and trafficking, and dominant popular culture representations frequently portray sex workers as victims.
This project seeks to evaluate how sex workers are attempting to organize in response to these new realities. Focusing on the regional network Redtrasex (The Network of Latin American and Caribbean Sex Workers), this project will be the first to explore the role and impact of this regional network on local and national organizing in two country case studies. With the goal of building towards a larger comparative research agenda, this pilot project will focus on Redtrasex and its relationship with local organizations in Colombia and Nicaragua. This project will provide new insights into the varying ways in which sex workers in the region are organizing in the face of conflicting transnational policy trends. The research will offer new theoretical contributions to how we understand the role of the regional networks in working with national level organizations around labour struggles.