Action research with sex workers: Dismantling barriers and building bridges
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conventional sex work research has tended to pathologize women in the sex industry by studying them as victims who lack the ability to make informed decisions about their lives and their work. Radical feminist research in particular has been successful in affecting public discourses, policy debates, and research agendas in this regard. While sex workers themselves contradict and critique conventional social science and radical feminist research, rarely are their voices heard and rarely have they been included in research processes. Given this context, it is not uncommon for sex workers to refuse to engage in research studies unless they are members of the research team. Action research philosophies and practices, therefore, are particularly relevant and important in supporting a growing wave of sex work research that has been endorsed, influenced, and supported by sex working communities. This article draws on my experiences conducting a research project with a Canadian sex workers' rights organization to demonstrate to how participatory research methods can work to build bridges, dismantle barriers, and establish new relationships of trust and support between feminists and sex workers. Ultimately, Iargue in favor of the fundamental importance of action research moving from research on sex workers to research with sex workers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it