Sex Work and Professional Risk Communication: Keeping Safe on the Streets

Abstract

Risk communication is traditionally authored by institutions and addressed to the potentially affected publics for whom they are responsible. This study expands the scope of risk communication by analyzing safety guides produced by a hypermarginalized group for whom institutions show no responsibility: full-contact, street-level sex workers. Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis and keyword analysis to reveal patterns of word choices, the authors argue that the safety guides exhibit characteristics and qualities of professional communication: audience adaptation, social responsibility, and ethical awareness. This area of inquiry—the DIY, peer-to-peer, extrainstitutional risk communication produced by marginalized people—widens technical and professional communication's approach to risk communication.

Wicked Problems in Risk Assessment: Mapping Yellow Fever and Constructing Risk as an Embodied Experience

“…For instance, in her work on miner safety, Sauer (1996) noted efforts to shift the responsibility of preventing mining accidents from managers and engineers to workers, “who,” as she put it, “have little control over the equipment, procedures, and environment in a hazardous workplace” (p. 307). Itchuqiyaq et al (2022), too, focused on navigating dangerous working conditions by analyzing risk guides created by sex workers. These “hyper marginalized” professionals, they explained, constructed risk information for other sex workers as well as clients and allies that was informed by “insider knowledge” (p. 9) that they acquired to keep themselves safe while performing this work.…”