“Carceral Harm Reduction”: A Critical Analysis of the Municipal Licensing of Body Rub Centres in Edmonton, Alberta

Abstract

The legal regulation of sex work in Canada was fundamentally shifted by the Harper government in 2014 with the passage of the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (2014). Within this new legal landscape, this dissertation investigates the regulation of indoor-based sex work by exploring the 2014-2015 changes to the Body Rub Centres (BRC) licensing regime and bylaw in Edmonton, Alberta. Scholars have extensively analyzed the effect that the Canadian Criminal Code has on sex work. There is less research on how municipal regulations shape indoor-based sex work, especially in BRCs. Fewer studies have explored the regulation of sex work in the prairies and in Alberta specifically. In this dissertation, I expand on sex work scholarship and attend to how municipal bylaws regulate BRC based sex work, and the complex relationship that bylaws have with other legal regulations, including provincial occupational health and safety laws and the federal Criminal Code. Inspired by Institutional Ethnography (Smith, 1987(Smith, , 2005) I used three methods to examine the organization of BRC work. These include textual analysis of City of Edmonton documents and provincial legislation; semistructured interviews with municipal officials and bureaucrats, members of communitybased organizations, and BRC sex workers and an owner; and participant observation sessions.

On multi-component Ermakov systems in a two-layer fluid: a variational approach

“…By using a series of complex relations listed above, one can derive some solutions of the two-layer fluid model. Such solutions may have applications in various physical fields, as mentioned in [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37]. Meanwhile, we wish that more general solutions can be constructed when some important factors, such as the Coriolis force, initial conditions and shapes of boundaries, are involved.…”

“…The physical configuration of the twolayer fluid is depicted in figure 1. It is known that the model (1) has been widely used in many physical fields such as fluid, hydrodynamics, geophysics, oceanic and atmospheric dynamics [26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. In the intervening years, a considerable amount of research work has been done on the model.…”