AFRS 281 - Decolonizing Sex Work

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Emerging out of a Prison Studies inspired group independent study and following a summer of a grant-funded research collaboration, this intensive highlights the leadership of a student-initiated digital humanities political education/public health project. Decolonizing Sex Work centers the lives, knowledge, witness, and insights of sex workers to better understand the paradox of sex work and reimagine its future as it holds a vital role in shaping cultural and political landscapes of power, desire, and punishment while remaining among the most unprotected labor forces. By sitting with first-hand accounts and narrative representations of the everyday lives of sex workers, students learn to listen and make connections between their many intersectional identity formations, emergent strategies of economic survival, and ethics of navigating policing, public, and personal safety. To this end, students are immersed in documentary/narrative film, photography, poetry, legal testimony, memoir, and additional media that center the voices of those most directly impacted by the criminalization and marginalization of sex workers while engaging the witness and testimony of local community partners whose work in sexual economies aim to grow awareness of worker’s rights and the movement to decriminalize sex work.

Working collaboratively, a small group of admitted students join their scholar-student peers, sitting with sex worker testimonies, and then producing a series of digital political education resources and public health tools that convert research to advocacy. This intensive is indebted to the intellectual leadership of generations of community educators whose efforts to support the survival of sex workers have challenged academics across disciplines to study their struggles and the double binds of political representation they must survive to protect themselves and each other in the face of criminalization, gender violence, disenfranchisement, and racial capitalism. Jasmine Syedullah.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: INT