Abstract
Including both academic and sex work activist community partners, panel members will discuss established and developing practices and key findings from the Sex Work Activist Histories Projects’ first two years as we collected and archived sex work activist histories. We draw from feminist and Indigenous frameworks of ethical, affective, and relational accountability (among groups, between academics and non-academics involved in the project, and between people and their records/histories) to productively consider how project relationships might be cultivated that are mutually accountable to the varied and complex analytical and affective positionalities of project members as they work together.
Highlights
A vibrant, influential, and connected Canadian sex work rights movement has, for decades been engaging in an array of remarkable resistance projects that counter dangerous sex work laws and dehumanizing public perceptions about sex workers
Sex Work Activist Histories Project (SWAHP) has set out to (1) collect or record, write, curate, preserve, and/or engage with more than forty years of activist histories from some of the longest-standing sex worker-led organizations in Canada; (2) augment, develop, and implement methodologies and best practices for valuing and sharing knowledge and expertise between non-academic and academic communities; (3) develop methodologies and best practices for the sharing/recording and preservation of alternative histories told/represented in ways that matter to their creators, including the Sex Work Database – a community archives being created by the project, and (4) support and contribute to feminist anti-violence scholarship and activism that contests conceptions of violence against certain people as deserved and expected
An ongoing challenge in doing this work collaboratively are the divergent vocabularies, project priorities, accountabilities, understandings of what is at stake, and risks and vulnerabilities between and among the sex work activist organization members and academic partners in this relationship/partnership
Summary
A vibrant, influential, and connected Canadian sex work rights movement has, for decades been engaging in an array of remarkable resistance projects that counter dangerous sex work laws and dehumanizing public perceptions about sex workers. SWAHP has set out to (1) collect or record, write, curate, preserve, and/or engage with more than forty years of activist histories from some of the longest-standing sex worker-led organizations in Canada; (2) augment, develop, and implement methodologies and best practices for valuing and sharing knowledge and expertise between non-academic and academic communities; (3) develop methodologies and best practices for the sharing/recording and preservation of alternative histories told/represented in ways that matter to their creators, including the Sex Work Database – a community archives being created by the project, and (4) support and contribute to feminist anti-violence scholarship and activism that contests conceptions of violence against certain people as deserved and expected. We share a wish to explore and uncover how we might put archival processes at the service of sex work activism This panel will discuss established and developing practices and key findings from SWAHP’s first two years as we worked with our partners to collect and archive their histories. Drawing on feminist and Indigenous notions of ethical and relational accountability provides a framework for us to productively consider how to be mutually accountable to our varied and complex analytical and affective positionalities in the specific context of this work and as we move forward together
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