“Nothing About Us Without Us”: Reading Protests against Oppressive Knowledge Production as Guidelines for Solidarity Research

Abstract

Drawing from my analysis of sex worker and homeless protests as well as my experience doing ethnographic research with people experiencing homelessness and people in the sex trade, I put forth recommendations for ethical, policy-relevant research with groups of people who experience routine, normalized violence, and who are frequently silenced and misrepresented by academics and policy makers. This article analyzes protests against what activists identify as oppressive knowledge production by “outsiders” who are not sex workers or homeless. Protest events against research “about us without us” occurred between 2012 and 2015, and targeted academic researchers and policymakers. I draw lessons from marginalized groups’ protests against knowledge production by outsider “experts” to present three problems with traditional poverty research: pathologization, paternalism, and extractive exotification. I use my observations of protests and service provision to develop guidelines for solidarity research, a knowledge production practice that prioritizes the needs and perspectives of marginalized communities.

Who Takes Part in the Political Game? The Sex Work Governance Debate in Israel

“…Lior, a former sex worker, described her frustration at not being considered when legislation was being decided on her behalf: “My voice has the significance of a little girl who doesn’t know what’s good for her…you won’t tell me what it will do to me.” Lior, who supports Israeli sex workers through her Facebook page and personal correspondences, echoed her own and others’ frustrations with being treated like women who are not worthy of voicing their opinions and who cannot differentiate between good and evil and therefore need the help of those who can. In other words, sex workers have become subordinate to the knowledge made about them by elite voices of legislators and other outsiders (Yarbrough, 2020 ). They are, thus, pushed aside and deemed as objects unworthy of voicing their various opinions (Agustín, 2008 ; Pitcher, 2015 , 2019 ).…”

“…Kahana presents both the radical abolitionist, feminist narrative and what Flaherty (2016, as cited in Yarbrough, 2020 , p. 69) called a “savior complex” narrative, according to which relatively privileged outsiders ignore the definitions of problems and solutions by the groups of people most directly affected and, instead, impose their own will. This narrative can also be destructive to sex workers’ agency, as the use of statistics designed to portray that outsiders “know what’s best” and have better suggestions than those actually working in the industry (Pitcher, 2019 ).…”

“…Sarah described a combination of actors who have power in and over the sex industry. The actors who play this political game are all beneficiaries of the legislation, albeit on different sides: politicians and feminist activists can reinforce the elite voices legislating on behalf of sex workers (Aroney & Crofts, 2019;Yarbrough, 2020), while third-parties can benefit from the growing underground market of sex work that may emerge after legislation (Agustín, 2008;Huschke, 2017;Kilvington, Day, & Ward, 2001;O'Connell Davidson, 2003;Vuolajärvi, 2019).…”

“…Joining the criticism of sex work scholars regarding the disregard of the voices of sex workers (Agustín, 2008 ; Armstrong, 2019 ; Pitcher, 2019 ; Sanders & Campbell, 2014 ; Weitzer, 2017 ; Yarbrough, 2020 ), this article addresses the question of how Israeli sex workers perceive the public debate over the governance of the sex industry in Israel. Based on fieldwork observations and interviews with both women working in the sex industry and legislators, we argue that the Israeli legislative proceedings initiated in 2007 discredited, silenced and excluded sex workers’ voice, thus, denying them parity of participation in democratic spaces which, as was shown by FitzGerald and McGarry ( 2016 ), perpetuates inequalities against an already disenfranchised group.…”

Glocalizing Women’s Empowerment: Feminist Contestation and NGO Activism in Iran

“…While I followed all the protocols mandated by the Institutional Review Board, I could not ignore that the processes of informed contest are often designed to serve and protect institutions and sponsors rather than vulnerable groups (Grady et al 2017). Informed consent, while necessary, can give researchers an illusion of ethical conduct without impeding the common harm inflicted on marginalized communities through paternalistic ethnographic research that pathologizes and exotifies marginalized groups (Yarbrough 2020). While the inclusion of marginalized populations in research introduces many ethical concerns, so does their exclusion, underrepresentation, or misrepresentation in academic studies.…”