![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
The Sex Work Database project is an interdisciplinary collaboration, currently based in Canada, to research and design digital activist archives of “born digital” and digitized academic research, print and visual media, grassroots activism, and commemorative responses related to missing and murdered women and sex work. This paper discusses the project’s development over its first few years, and discusses the complexities of organizing and representing digital/digitized information using a feminist anti-violence framework. In doing so, we introduce and examine two challenges we have encountered to date: designing a tagging system that expresses the activist frame of the Sex Work Database, and the ethics and efficacy of strategic ephemerality for materials produced by sex worker activists.
Acknowledgements
Heartfelt thanks to our community partners and experiential consultants for sharing your content and expertise. Without you, there is no project. Thanks, too, to the Sunday Writing Group for your invaluable feedback on two separate drafts of this paper.
Notes
1. In the Canadian context, decolonization describes the unlearning and stripping away of the powerful ideological structures from more than five hundred years of white settler colonialism imposed on many Indigenous nations via socio-cultural, economic, legal, educational, and political norms. In addition to the stealing of Indigenous lands through a series of treaties—most of which have not been honoured—and the establishment of a land Reserve system still in operation today, Canada’s Indian Act was a particularly effective element of the national colonial project. Established shortly after Canada’s official formation as a country, the act instituted a Residential School system that removed children as young as four years old from their communities and effectively incarcerated them in Residential Schools. Recently recognized by the United Nations as a form of cultural genocide, Indian Residential Schools (IRS) operated with the express goal of “training the Indian out of the child.” As the recently-concluded Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission findings make clear, the IRS indoctrinated children in colonial patriarchy and internalized racism; staff at the schools also enacted widespread physical and emotional abuse, as well as sexual violence (TRC Citation2015a). Begun in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the last Residential School closed in 1996 in the province of Saskatchewan.
Indigenous and non-Indigenous persons and groups have long resisted the violent colonial project. As we discuss in more detail later in this paper, decolonization names these processes of recognition, cooperation, and resistance—of recognizing and attempting to remedy the effects of such long-term colonial violence.
2. As the project proceeds, consultation and collaboration with community could significantly alter availability of materials to some or all of these audiences.
3. We use the term “digital archives” to refer to DAMC collections and to other collections of “born digital” and digitized materials available online via public, institutional, and personal sites. Recognizing that “[s]o-called digital archives have their own materiality and are often closely linked to physical repositories” (Eichhorn Citation2014, 236, n2), we nonetheless employ “digital archives” to differentiate DAMC work from archives housed solely in physical spaces.
4. In fact, both Ferris and Ladner anticipate that the DAMC project will be career-long. While the project is currently funded externally and we will continue to apply for further grants, community interest, existing infrastructure, and our use of free open-source software offer the potential to continue regardless. What this means in the short term is that we are using current funds to establish both the digital and methodological architecture of all three of DAMC archives, including plans for worst case (no more external funds) and best case (continued multi-year funding) scenarios. Ultimately, we trust that DAMC archives will belong to the community and be maintained via a form of crowd-sourcing, or wider community engagement. This is why we are consulting widely with all communities involved, and will be working to build capacity among community members over the next few years. That said, as long as Ladner, Ferris, and Allard work in academia, we will be able to maintain and upgrade servers as needed, train at least one student each per year to support community in archival maintenance, and mentor new academics for this ongoing activist project. In addition, two of the DAMC archives—Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Database and Post-Apology Indian Residential School Database—may fit the mandate of the National Research Centre on Indian Residential Schools (TRC Citation2015b) that is housed here at the University of Manitoba. We are cultivating partnerships with this centre that may result in more formal support or maintenance of DAMC archives.
5. Before we found Heratrix, the open-source code we are modifying, we worked for two years taking multiple screenshots of activist websites and saving them as high-resolution pdfs—a process that was fraught with frustration in part because it was impossible to reproduce the interactivity of the website visitor’s experience. Since the early days of the DAMC project, not only have websites become much more complex and extensive (making our original cataloguing records near impossible to do comprehensively, even for a single site), digital archiving tools such as Archive It have been developed to enable the saving of entire websites in their original forms/layouts. Because the institutional version of Archive It—which our own institution’s archives employ—requires that records be saved on US servers, we are working with partners to modify Heratrix, key source code from Archive It, such that we may save such interactive copies of websites on our server/s.
6. Canadian researchers are governed by the 2014 Tri-Council Policy Statement for ethical research with human subjects. Tri-Council policy encourages collaboration between researchers and community partners, advocates elaborate consultation with those involved in research (TCPS Citation2014, article 4.7, 53), and notes “Building reciprocal, trusting relationships will take time,” when working with Indigenous communities (TCPS 2 Citation2014, ch. 9, 105). We argue that such attention to relationship building benefits researchers working with any marginalized communities, especially those who have been mistreated and exploited by researchers in the past. For more on anti-oppressive and anti-colonial research methods, see Kalawant Bhopal’s “Gender, Identity and Experience: Researching Marginalised Groups” (Citation2010), Leslie Brown and Susan Strega’s Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous, & Anti-oppressive Approaches (Citation2005b), Elizabeth Kendall, Naomi Sunderland, Leda Barnett, Glenda Nalder, and Christopher Matthews’ “Beyond the Rhetoric of Participatory Research in Indigenous Communities” (Citation2011), Shilton and Srinivasan’s “Counterpoint: Participatory Appraisal and Arrangement for Multicultural Archival Collections” (Citation2007), Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies (Citation2012), Emily Van der Meulen’s “Action Research with Sex Workers: Dismantling Barriers and Building Bridges” (Citation2011), and Shawn Wilson’s Research is Ceremony (Citation2008).
7. Decriminalization of prostitution eliminates any laws that criminalize sex workers and their clients (WHO Citation2005).
8. See It Starts With Us (Citation2015), NMS (Citation2015), and Maryanne Pearce (Citation2013).
9. Kleiss’s April 8, 2008 article is part of a series of articles Kleiss wrote about an Edmonton, Canada-based serial killer whose surname appears in a significant portion of associated headlines. The headlines alone suggest a preoccupation with the killer. For more analysis of sex work-related news reporting, see chapters 1 and 2 of Ferris’s book, Street Sex Work and Canadian Cities (Citation2015), Hallgrimsdottir et al.’s “Sporting Girls, Streetwalkers, and Inmates of Houses of Ill Repute: Media Narratives and the Historical Mutability of Prostitution Stigmas” (Citation2008), Yasmin Jiwani and Mary Lynn Young’s “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourses” (Citation2006), and Strega et al.’s “Never Innocent Victims: Street Sex Workers in Canadian Print Media” (Citation2014).
10. As an activist archive, we employ only terms that have been vetted by the activist communities we support. It is important to note that “prostitute” is not a term the activists with whom we ally use to describe themselves. However, because “prostitute” is a legal term and one that students and journalists—audiences we hope will use the Sex Work Database—regularly employ, our community consultants have given us the go-ahead to use it.
11. One of this paper’s blind reviewers asked that we consider whether we are in fact developing a new form of collection, not a digital archive. We are intrigued by this question but do not have a direct answer now. However, we thank the reviewer for flagging this part of the project for us. What we can say, currently, is that while non-academic community members accept the project for what it is—i.e., a means of supporting and disseminating community activism—the interdisciplinarity of the project continues to create both excitement and discomfort in academic audiences. The project has never fit comfortably in Archival Studies, but our discussions of process and development have been equally awkward to place elsewhere given their engagement with Archival Studies and Information Science Literature.
12. In fact, to date every sex worker activist group we have approached for materials has been enthusiastic about both the Sex Work Database project and the opportunity to donate.