(Re)imagining research, activism, and rights at the intersections of sexuality, health, and social justice

ABSTRACT

The Covid-19 pandemic inaugurated a new global order of public life and health marked by death, despair and alienation. As a crisis of a global scale, it made the task of (re)imagination simultaneously necessary and extremely difficult. It is this double bind of the difficulty and imminence of imagination that motivates the curation of this special issue. In this introduction, we map the connections between the theme of this volume and the key ideas that constitute its varied contributions, which we organised under three broad mobilising ideas: Rights and Resilience; Sexuality, Health and Justice; and Politics of Knowledge Production and Collaborations. Contributions cover myriad issues, engage in methodological innovations and play with diverse genres. Alongside more traditional academic writings, there are community-based research papers, activist conversations, visual essays, reflective pieces and interviews. The geographical span of the contributions brings insights from around the world and the number of topics covered in this issue are equally vast including, among others, mental health, disability, environment, sex work, violence, queerness, LGBTQ+ experiences, love and anger. The aim of this special issue, then, is to challenge the Manichean distinctions that are often drawn between research and activism, and by extension, between theory and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge production
• activism
• participatory research
• social justice
• sexuality

Introduction

The Covid-19 pandemic inaugurated a new global order of public life and health marked by death, despair and alienation. As a crisis of a global scale, it made the task of (re)imagination simultaneously necessary and extremely difficult. The speed of viral spread, the immediacy of human vulnerability, the fear of death, and the deep inadequacies and inequities of healthcare put the brakes on any engagement with the idea of a future. This aggravated the existing asymmetries in access to scientific knowledge and resources (Jasanoff, 2021). The re-weaponisation of surveillance and border control used public health concerns as a conceit for normalising state-corporation-military control over planetary life (Dodsworth, 2021). Everything was imminent, immediate, and intimate. Wherever we were located – we might not have ever confronted risk and uncertainty in this way under conditions of supposed peace.

Yet, while the overall sense of doom and despair and the mandates of lockdowns and quarantine made us live atomised lives within the provinces of our homes (for those of us who had homes), state brutality against precarious citizens and non-citizens continued unbated. In India, we saw millions of daily wage labourers walk thousands of miles to return to their villages from large cities. Many died in the unrelenting heat of the Indian summer completely uncared for by the state. Those who managed to reach their destinations were treated as vectors of the disease and sanitised with toxic sprays (Bandhopadhyay et al., 2021). Similar neglect and brutality were seen in South Africa, where the number of incidents of police violence against civilians rose dramatically during the initial months of lockdown, particularly against South Africa's most marginalised: the poor, women, LGBTQ+¹ people, foreign-born migrants (including refugees), and those working in the informal economy sector, such as street vendors and sex workers (Oliveira & Walker, 2021). Law enforcement officials, including the army, private security and police, were given license to secure borders and maintain order in ways that would be extreme even for an authoritarian state (Landau & Kihato, 2020; Trippe, 2020). A catostrophic combination of denialism, corruption, finger pointing, and political manoeuvering was seen in Brazil during the pandemic (Caponi, 2020; Ortega & Orsini, 2020). This led to a pandemic response founded in conspiracy theories and elite-friendly economic policies, leading to soaring deaths, hospital collapses and calamities that primarily affected the country's poor, Black and Indigenous populations (Baqui et al., 2020; Krenak, 2020). And in the US, thousands braved the infection, to take to the streets to protest the drastic injustice in the killing of George Floyd by the police (AFP, 2020). Like so many other places in the world, in all of these contexts, mutual aid groups demonstrated what kind of social justice work can be done by communities in the face of complete state apathy (Ortega & Béhague, 2022; Sitrin & Sembrar, 2020). These scenes of human resilience were powerful indications that holding on to the future was a necessary ethical imperative (Parker & Ferraz, 2021).

It is this double bind of the impossibility and imminence of imagination that motivates the curation of this special issue of Global Public Health. As scholar-activists working in the areas of sexuality, rights and health from varied disciplinary vantages,² we were able to see the shared challenges that the event of the pandemic posed to our lives and work of imaginations. The existing theoretical and activist tools that we were trained to use to understand (and sometimes transform) our worlds seemed woefully inadequate. What would participatory research mean when we are unable to participate? What might care mean when we are not able to hold each other? What might solidarity mean when our bodies have become the fault lines that fracture movements? How do we live with death when it is the order of the day? How do we collaborate when the knowledge apartheid of Zoom university aligns with the vaccine apartheid of big pharma? How do we think of the labour of academic work and the affect of care work when the realms of the public and the private have collapsed on and into each other, where the home has become the office and the office, home? Do the anthropocentric assumptions that underlie our understanding of human rights and sexual health reinforce a species hierarchy in the era of climate change? Of course, these questions we pose aren't new, but our reckoning with the pandemic (or perhaps the failure to reckon with it) has opened up a generative possibility. How do we think with these challenges without sentimentalising the pandemic as exceptional, while at the same time not reducing it to business-as-usual (only in exaggerated form)?

The gesture of ‘(re)imagining’ felt like a difficult yet necessary orientation in the face of these challenges. Difficult because we are still living through the pandemic and its accompanying and unfolding forms of violence, without any template for knowing what is to come and what is to be done. Necessary because that is the bare minimum of obligation that we owe to the promise of a future that struggles for social justice are invested in, even in these dark times.

The parenthetical prefix – the ‘(re)’ – in the theme of this special issue is thus crucial. It suggests the polysemic forms that the idea of imagination might take: through re-visioning, re-considering, re-evaluating, re-working, re-thinking, re-doing, re-making, re-structuring. The promise of such actions lies both in innovation, and in working anew with old tools as a way of rectification. The tasks of innovation and rectification run the risk of reifying the very categories and structures that, as researchers and activists, we often want to work against or with. Innovation and rectification can also help us repair; and perhaps reform the irreparable. The work of (re)imagination is not an orientation that closes off. It opens us up to both possibilities and perils. To futures and failures.

In this special issue, our gesture of (re)imagining is organised through the three ideas of research, activism and rights. The two key practices that the four editors of this special issue engage in combine research and activism. We are all formally associated with university spaces, and our research is deeply inspired and informed by our association with activist movements. This, however, does not mean that we understand the university as the site of research and movements as the site of activism. Rather, what we continue to learn from our work is that the university is and ought to be an activist site as much as movements are and ought to be a site for theoretical knowledge production. This special issue, thus, challenges the Manichean distinctions that are often drawn between research and activism, and by extension, between theory and practice (Harcourt, 2020). The articles in this issue do not consider them as identical, but at the same time acknowledge that each co-constitutes the other.

We identified three broad mobilising themes in this issue under which the contributions have been organised, even as we feel that most of these do not strictly adhere to a single thematic categorisation. Not only do the articles touch upon multiple themes, but they also engage in methodological innovations and play with diverse genres. Alongside more conventional academic writings, there are community-based research papers, activist conversations, visual essays, reflective pieces, interviews and commentaries. The geographical span of these contributions brings insights from Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Greece, India, Kenya, Malawi, Panama, Peru, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, UK and USA. The number of topics covered in the issue are equally vast including, among many others, mental health, disability, environment, sex work, violence, queerness, trans and LGBTQIA+ experiences, love and anger.

When we set out to put together this collection, we neither anticipated this unique mix of form, substance and regional representation, nor such overwhelming response to our call for submissions which resulted in an issue with 31 articles. As editors, although the pandemic was not the primary focus for us, we included a variety of submissions that touched on this topic. However, there are a few contributions that specifically discuss the experiences of the pandemic and perhaps may not have been written if we were not living through these times. Boglárka Fedorkó, Luca Stevenson & P. G. Macioti report on the impact of the Covid pandemic on the lives and livelihood of sex workers in Europe, while also foregrounding the role of sex worker rights’ groups in collectively organising to fight, and research, such impact. Similarly, Cristian González Cabrera's interview with Pau González, the co-founder of Hombres Trans Panamá (Trans Men Panamá) discusses the grave consequences of gendered quarantine measures put in place during the lockdown in Panama and the resilience of transgender activism in the face of the challenges faced by the community during the pandemic. On a different note, Nico A. Canoy draws our attention to a non-relational account of love that may be found precisely when the geopolitics of the pandemic have created a heightened sense of space and place, and an intense desire for hope.

Rights and resilience

The meeting point between research and activism for all of us as editors, and our contributors, is rights. Our view of rights is multifaceted, and this was also very much reflected in the contributions. As the standard understanding goes, rights arise from an individual or collective claim against a state or proto-state authority which is accountable for protecting it. The individual or collective is able to legitimately invoke the claim to protect themselves from potential violation of their rights or seek redress in the wake of such violation (Wenar, 2005). The strength of a claim, however, is predicated upon how claimants are validated and their rights are realised. Lise Woensdregt and Lorraine Nencel tell us how male sex workers in Kenya pave the way for the realisation of their rights through community-led advocacy efforts and the sensitisation of law enforcement officials. Amr Marzouk and Gabry Vanderveen's visual essay on the Instagram-based account ‘Assault Police’ present a depiction of how activist rights claimants in Egypt fought sexual violence through a social media account and local campaign that eventually expanded to fighting the structural roots of violence against women. Erin Stern, Murylo Batista, Geordan Shannon, Lori Heise^, and Jenevieve Mannel present a comparative study to show how, in the absence of an effective rights protecting authority, community activists work towards the prevention of intimate partner violence in Peru and Uganda. We also have a historical account of activism and rights struggles underlying colonial era legislative processes. Kaushalya Bajpayee writes about the political struggles of Indian legislators to realise the recognition of indigenous medicinal knowledge practices vis a vis western medicine and public health under the British colonial authority.

In most modern and liberal settings, the validation of rights claimants, is formally produced through the law – the constitution in local settings, and international human rights conventions or treaties in transnational settings. The law validates citizens as legitimate claimants and certain claims as valid against a right enshrined in law (Campbell, 2001). But as all movement-based rights claimants know, law is a contested site. How would a claim for protection or redress succeed if the right in question is not validated by the law? How would an individual or a collective qualify as a citizen if the law does not consider them as one? Drawing on their experiences of leading a sexual rights campaign in South Asia, Ishani Ida Cordeiro, Stuti Tripathi and Susana Fried, for example, show us the flawed nature of state-authorised legal rights and its inadequate conception of the sexuality of young people.

State-authorised conceptions of legal rights share a troubled relationship with rights claims. Judicial reasoning in the US Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that revoked the right to abortion guaranteed in the landmark Roe v Wade judgment, suggests that there was no right to abortion to begin with as no such validation can be based on the US constitution's original text. So, all claims to the right to abortion would henceforth stand constitutionally invalid (Gerstein & Ward, 2022; Hoffman, 2022). In other instances, consider claims by the sex workers’ movement in India and South Africa, where those involved in the sex industry have been demanding the right to sex work but, until recently, the state did not consider that claim to be valid because it did not recognise through law that sex work is a legitimate form of work (Bakshi, 2022; Dutta, 2019).

Due to such state-authorised discriminations, both abortion and sex work remain an especially fertile ground for the rights question and contestations of citizenship. Writing on abortion, Mariana Prandini Assis and Joanna Erdman argue for moving beyond the medical-legal paradigms that have predominated in abortion scholarship and activism, and towards the novel forms and practices advocated for as part of self-managed abortion activism. They demand the democratisation of the field through greater attention to service delivery and other such lessons grounded in years of feminist activism around abortion rights. Discussing sex work, through an interview with South African sex worker and advocate Dudu Dlamini, Skye Wheeler draws out the links between commercial sex and motherhood. This is an aspect of sex workers’ lives that rarely finds explicit articulation within their rights discourses.

In legal terms, to be constituted as a citizen becomes the a priori condition to have ‘the right to have rights’ under modern law (Gessen, 2018). However, a strategy to offset this difficulty with claiming rights within domestic jurisdictions – in the absence of the recognition of both citizenship status and rights claims – is to invoke guarantees enshrined in international human rights law conventions and treaties. Many of the guiding principles for domestic human rights claims and collectivisation can be said to have emerged from human rights law's transnational possibilities (Tsutsui et al., 2012). For example, the UN Human Rights Committee's 1991 decision in Toonen v Australia enabled the right to privacy standard to be used for demanding the decriminalisation of colonial-era anti-sodomy laws in some post-colonial countries, including India (Suresh, 2019). A lot of the vocabulary that enabled conversations on reproductive and sexual rights claims – especially the latter being an independent category of right rather than a sub-category of the former – were forged through contestations between queer-feminist activists and conservative forces at the International Conference on Population and Development at Cairo in 1994, and subsequently at the Beijing Word Conference on Women in 1995 (Miller, 2000).

These stories of activist success in the field of rights co-exist with the ways in which international human rights law continues to be used as tools for colonial and imperial control (Samson, 2020). The debates around the universalist versus relativist narratives of human rights, especially as they play out in the area of violence against women and queer rights, demonstrate how certain ‘western’ markers of progress – like secularism, democracy, free markets, private property and marriage equality – have become the qualifiers for measuring whether a country, culture or community is human rights affirmative or not (Merry, 2003; Visweswaran, 2004). If such criteria are not met, powerful western countries can impose economic sanctions and even justify war in the name of saving helpless non-western women and queers from their barbaric cultures, as was the case with the US military intervention in Afghanistan after September 11 (Kapur, 2002). Conversely, we have seen governments in non-western states use the conceit of relativism to defend egregiously harmful practices in the name of culture. In so doing, such states perform a revisionism that harks back to fantasies of pure pasts to rationalise modern forms of brutality against their own citizens (Binder, 1999). The persecution of the Rohingya by the Myanmar government (Mutaqin, 2018), the caste-based violence meted out against India's Dalit citizens (Bob, 2007), and the debates around the 1993 Bangkok Declaration on Asian Values (Ciorciari, 2012), are instances of the perverse use of the relativist argument. Both universalism and relativism are thus hegemonic forms of knowledge that are used to reproduce and reify existing structures of oppression at both transnational and domestic levels.

Rights, then, are not a universal good – they simultaneously regulate and emancipate. Their promises and betrayals are contingent upon historical contexts (Moyn, 2019). And marginalised rights claimants and activists who work with subaltern groups are most cognizant of this paradox, as also evidenced in the contributions in this issue. It is a (re)imagination of the relationship between research and activism that produces this wisdom about the double bind of rights. In this task of (re)imagination, activists have challenged the ways in which academic research produces gatekeeping practices of expertise – forcing researchers to go back to fundamental ethical questions about who speaks for whom, whose knowledge counts, whose experiences are written out of academic research (Oliveira & Vearey, 2020; Stammers, 2009). Writing about sex work in South Africa, Jenny Coetzee, Venice Mbowane, Fikile Mlambo, Patricia Ndlovu, Bontle Rasego and Minja Milovanovic raise questions relating to the absence of sex workers’ voice and representation in dominant rights discourses concerning their lives and the role of research; thus arguing for more responsible community-centric research and knowledge formation on sex workers’ lives and livelihood. Helenard Louw's piece featuring photo stories by working-class coloured men living with paraplegia in Cape Town townships also raises similar methodological questions in relation to disability and how these result in the unlawful representations of disabled people leading to their denial of a right to holistic humanity and personhood.

The collaborative efforts of academics and activists provide insights into the strategic forms of negotiations that movements led by marginalised groups have enabled where the approach has not been to get paralysed by the paradoxes of rights. Queer-feminist and decolonial academic research has demonstrated, however, that even activist practices risk getting depoliticised through NGO-isation and philanthrocapitalism. Where both states and corporations produce a bureaucratic ecosystem of funding and measurements, activists often just write grant applications and compliance reports rather than doing community-based work of mutual aid or radical direct action (Merry, 2017; Roy, 2015).

The (re)imagination of rights that has emerged through many of the articles in this special issue is one that is not just the letter of the law enshrined in documents like national constitutions or the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women; rather, rights are a normative and ever-shifting ethical horizon, perhaps impossible to reach but nonetheless necessary to hold on to (Baxi, 2008). In this spirit of re-imagining a shifting horizon, South African sex worker rights activist Ishtar Lakhani draws attention to the imperative of invoking creative methodologies that focus on not just the fact of rightlessness but help us articulate what an oppression free future might look like. It is this kind of a (re)imagination of rights that grounds it in the quotidian and vernacularised experiences of struggles and triumphs, rather than being presented as a transcendental universal promise.

Sexuality, health and justice

We locate our project of (re)imagination – with the help of the contributions in this issue – at the intersections of sexuality, health and social justice for three reasons. From the perspective of the editors, these reasons have to do with our learnings from collaborative academic-activist work for many years and our association with sexual rights movements in Brazil, India, South Africa and the USA. A key learning from this experience – which is also evidenced through history and documented in a series of critical rights analysis – is the way in which even within activist and academic work on rights, there is a hierarchisation between civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights. In this hierarchy, civil and political rights are considered to be of greater importance and economic, social and cultural rights need to be realised progressively based on the capacity of the state (Corrêa et al., 2008). For example, as the reproductive justice movement first noted in the mid-1990s in the United States, even within the field of reproductive rights such hierarchies and dichotomies exist (Price, 2020), and have contributed to severely restricting Black women's access to contraception, abortion and the resources needed to effectively make choices to have, or not have, children (Silliman et al., 2016; West, 2008). The hierarchy is based on a dichotomisation between the understanding of individual rights and the collective rights that emerged in the wake of the Cold War (Leffler & Westad, 2010). The effect of such a combined hierarchy and dichotomy is that sexual rights and the right to health have been considered less important than, for example, the right to vote or the right to free speech. That this is patently false is a learning from our activist-academic experiences.

The right to sexual orientation would mean nothing if not accompanied by the right to free speech. Similarly, of what use is the right to vote if the state cannot guarantee rights to health and wellbeing? Elections, after all, are not the most important marker for a polity to call itself a democracy. This has become especially apparent in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, that saw how several states carried out putatively successful elections, many to reinstate totalitarian leaders, while their health systems were in shambles. We also saw how in the name of protecting the right to health of their citizens, wealthy western nations – with support from extremely wealthy corporations – who have historically waged wars in the name of bringing democracy to non-western states, actively supported and enabled a vaccine apartheid against these apparently lesser nations whose citizens were treated as the disposables of the world (Bajaj et al., 2022). So, the first reason for our focus on sexuality, health and social justice has to do with working against this hierarchisation and dichotomisation of civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights.

The second reason for this focus, particularly on sexuality, is about the way in which research, activism and human rights discourses have historically considered sexuality to be an unimportant or frivolous issue in comparison to issues like race and class. While the theme of this special issue remains resolutely committed to an intersectional approach to rights, we have taken this provocation by Gayle Rubin (2007, p. 150) very seriously:

To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant topic, a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine, or nuclear annihilation. But it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality … sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great social stress.

We know from history the challenges that raising the sexuality question has posed to labour rights movements, to feminist movements, to collective demands for land rights, the rights to health and healthcare, to asylum, and movements demanding self-determination, among many others. We don't want to exceptionalise sexuality as a unique category, but this issue does highlight it as an identity, subjectivity and an analytic that remains marginal to both liberal and radical rights claims. The contributors in this issue write about diverse aspects of the lived experiences of sexuality that help to both enrich and fill the gap in discourses relating to sexual health and rights. In the conversation between PJ Starr, Monica Jones, The Incredible, Edible MF Akynos and Bambi Katsura, the authors not only complicate ideas of sex work and sexuality, but they also highlight the importance of creative activist approaches to rights and social justice. Drawing on their own experience as a Two-spirit MíKmaw person, John R. Sylliboy gives us an account of coming out stories of Two-spirit people in Atlantic Canada collected through qualitative research that employed Indigenous, Two-spirit and Western perspectives for its conception, implementation and analysis. Writing about body politics, Jacqueline Gaybor and Wendy Harcourt's paper narrates how activist interventions around menstruation contributes to sexual health discourses.

In the times that we are living through, what an attention to sexuality can help us see, is how it has become the site at which movements with ostensibly diametrically opposed ideologies become strange bedfellows. This is particularly the case with the shared commitment to carcerality and criminalisation that is advanced by radical feminism and the conservative right in many parts of the democratic world (Halley et al., 2019). Adriana Piscitelli's ethnographic work in this volume observes the growth and potency of the putafeminista (whore feminist) movement in Brazil using the analytical categories of ‘love’ and ‘anger’ to explore their relationship with the feminist movement. She notes that while the feminist movement purports to adhere to decolonial feminist principles of love and plurality, some groups have responded to sex worker activists with intense anger and virtual aggression rather than embracing their cause. Similarly, we have seen how trans-phobic and gender-critical positions have been shared by both fascists/white supremacists and Trans Exclusionary Feminists (Butler, 2021; Camminga, 2019; Leffingwell, 2021). By taking note of current geopolitics and speaking from a trans feminist position, Maria Clara Araújo dos Passos & Viviane Vergueiro Simakawa question conceptual frameworks that have become accepted wisdom for understanding issues relating to gender and sexuality.

The social dimensions of justice are as significant as its political dimensions and are related to how the law validates rights. Political justice is interested in responding to experiences of rightslessness by making rights for specific groups or individuals justiciable in a court of law. Democratically recognising rights in a legal document that makes a particular authority (such as the state) accountable is the only vision of achievement that political justice commits itself to. Such an achievement is understood as the telos of a justice-seeking enterprise (Sircar, 2019). While this is indeed an important achievement for any movement, it is only part of a larger normative and ethical vision that social justice enables us to work with.

In this vision, rights struggles are not just about strategising to hold the state accountable, or punish a perpetrator, or getting the state to enact a law, or a court to pass a favourable judgment. Rather, rights struggles are also about the joys, the sorrows, the care, the community, the friendships and the failures that are intrinsic to any collective action (Brown, 2019). Through ethnographic research based in Kolkata, India, Sayan Bhattacharya writes about trans people's experiences of negotiating their identities and inhabiting violent institutions through affective and emotive expressions. In her interview with Fernanda Ribeiro, Maria de Jesus Costa discusses her life trajectory in activism and prostitution. It is the violence, racism and tendency towards victimisation which she saw around her in institutional and personal contexts that inspired her to become involved in the Black rights, HIV, sex work and feminist movements. Her involvement in diverse movements has led to a view that she is politics, a complete fusion of the personal, social and political, blurring distinctions summarised in her assertion that, ‘our political party is whore’.

Privileging the political over the social in our conceptions of justice would be an injustice to these visceral and affective dimensions of the work that we do as researchers and activists as part of movements. As researchers with a queer-feminist orientation, all the editors, as well as our contributors, do not see the social and the political as distinct. This distinction historically is a product of liberalism that considered the social to be a part of the private and the political to be a part of the public (Chatterjee, 1989; Kapur, 2020). This special issue unsettles this public/ private dichotomy that is at the foundation of the separation between political and social justice. And the attention of the articles to the intersections of sexuality and health – matters that are simultaneously private and political – enable a richer, layered and textured understanding of the many dimensions of social justice that takes both the structural and the affective seriously.

The politics of knowledge production and collaborations

It is de rigueur to consider collaboration as an established convention of queer-feminist research and activism. Yet, a challenge that collaborative practices continue to struggle with is how to shift the material asymmetries of power and knowledge, even if temporarily, through the kind of collaborations we forge. It is not enough to simply characterise our work as collaborative, for it to be able to unsettle the deep roots of power that we want to challenge. In fact, collaboration can easily become a mask that hides our own complicities with power (Oliveira & Vearey, 2020). For us as well, as the authors who contributed to the special issue, collaboration would thus mean to actively cede the authority of disciplinary expertise, the authority of experience and authorial control. Based on their experiences in the context of co-produced health research, Sam Miles, Alicia Renedo and Cicely Marston guide us on how to reimagine authorship conventions and promote equity in academic collaborations between academic and non-academic authors. While Catalina Correa-Salazar, Laura Martinez, Daniela Maldonado Salamanca, Yoko Ruiz, Rocío Guarín, Luna Alejandra Gernández Guarín and Amy Ritterbusch take a critical view of activist knowledge formation and show how ethical actions such as self-criticism, constant reflection and radical honesty can serve as tools for working out a revolutionary ethos and implementing care and justice.

To question forms of knowledge production does not mean to abandon authority but to acknowledge its limitations. Poonam Daryani, Leila Ensha, Mariah Frank, Lily Kofke, Francesca Maviglia and Alice M. Miller address this problematic through an account of their experiences of a community-based participatory research project with sex worker activists in the United States, questioning if, and how, a privileged academic position might be usefully confronted and even subverted as part of health justice practices and interventions. Amanda de Mello Calabria's epistemological intervention reflects on the co-creation of Lourdes Barreto's life story as a pioneering sex worker activist in Brazil, drawing attention to how the research process led to a deep affective relationship with Lourdes and Calabria's becoming an active member of the sex worker movement.

As editors, we have come together to think about this special issue as friends, located in different parts of the world, and bring our diverse disciplinary traditions to think about the collection of articles that form part of this volume. This was no easy task. It required us to continuously shift the frames of our interpretation and analysis, and not allow us to either take these for granted or consider them as the most helpful. Such an approach to collaborative work is perhaps best described as what Mel Chen has called ‘feral methodologies’ (Chen, 2012).

The method of our collaboration is also feral in another sense – this is the collaborative community that we have formed with the contributors of this issue. As editors, our practices of reading the works of our contributors could not be predicated upon the conventions of how editorial sifting and evaluation is carried out for academic journals. The challenge was to cultivate an editorial practice that took the contribution on its own terms rather than imposing the terms of academic scholarship on it. This required us to remain vigilant of the gatekeeping impulses of our disciplines that we are complicit in. Simultaneously, we needed to learn about and experiment with newer, more inclusive methodologies.

In this spirit of experimentation, Gabriel Hoosain Khan & John Marnell write about how to use collaborative research methods for addressing sexual, gender and health inequalities based on their experiences with the Creative Change Laboratory in South Africa. Drawing our attention to a photovoice project with LBGTQ+ refugees and asylum seekers in Greece, Moshoula Capous-Desyllas and Milia Akkouris urge us to re-envision arts-based research practices and adopt an anti-oppressive approach. Writing about critical methodology and results from participatory, ethnographic research conducted by Syrian and South Sudanese women and girl refugees in Lebanon and Uganda, Alina Potts, Harriet Kolli and Loujine Fattal show how questions of power and positionality are central for knowledge production on gender-based violence. Based on their experiences of conducting a university-community collaborative project with an LGBTQIA+ shelter in Brazil, Angela Donini, Camila Bacellar, Flavia Viana and Marina Cavalcanti, likewise, share insights on pedagogy and the use of audio-visual methods for critical knowledge production.

The authors of the more traditional works carried in the issue foreground some of the very tensions of the collaborative process mentioned above in their own research with communities, life practices and struggles that they are writing about. There are also pieces in this collection that focus, in particular, on the tensions and challenges of collaborative knowledge production with sex worker communities. Penelope Saunders takes a critical view of the subordinate position that is generally accorded to sex workers within academic-sex worker research relations. Saunders argues for the inclusion of sex workers' knowledge about injustice that is produced through their activism into the conceptual frameworks used in academic research. Nosipho Vidima, Ruvimbo Tenga and Ntokozo Yingwana argue for the use of Feminist Participatory Action Research to position sex workers as stakeholders and co-creators within the research process, rather than as mere informants. Greta Schuler and Katlego Rasebitse reflect on a five-year collaborative newsletter project between sex workers and researchers in South Africa to speak about its relevance even beyond academia.

The collaborative realisation of this special issue has thus been an encounter with varied forms and genres of writings whose conventions and traditions we had to learn to read – from the standard academic article to reflective essays to creative works to conversation pieces to interviews. As editors, we worked closely with contributors writing in languages other than English. This work was a form of reciprocal handholding where the authors helped the editors translate their works into English. Similarly, to include first-time writers in this issue, the editors collaborated with such authors to give shape and form to their compelling experiences and ideas. It was also refreshing, for example, to be able to carry a conversation piece as a way for us to introduce a dialogic style of writing (and speaking) by activists in an academic journal.

Conclusion

As scholars and activists, we often associate critical knowledge production with the unconventional or that which unsettles norms and standards of accepted wisdom. But as editors of this special issue, our primary provocation from the journey of curating this volume has been about how to interrogate the lines that divide and hierarchise knowledge, in terms of what we categorise as conventional/non-conventional. This process of self-interrogation – that we have attempted in this special issue in collaboration with our contributors – is easier said than done. When we critique the exclusionary nature of categories, we inevitably create newer categories of our own that produce their own exclusions. Moreover, what we think of as ‘unconventional’ is not without its own traditions and conventions. Depending on the context, these varied critical traditions may sometimes be in conversation and at other times in conflict. Collaborations, too, are rife with power struggles and rivalries that must be accounted for, and for which, we must take responsibility.

Collaborative critical knowledge production will then always remain a site of struggle and re-imagination. But undoubtedly, this work of re-imagination is a generative struggle, and when done as a collaborative activity, can be an opportunity for newer learnings and shifting horizons. For this special issue, drawing on the insights from the varied contributions, we have come to understand collaboration as a process of re-thinking with the ethics and politics of knowledge production. Not to identify solutions in the collaborative process or to romanticise critique and solidarity, but to consider their complexities as the condition necessary for (re)imagining social justice through research and activism.

Acknowledgements

Debolina Dutta would like to thank Oishik Sircar for his close reading of this paper and comments; Katyayani Suhrud for her invaluable research assistance; and David Kennedy and the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School for the time and resources to work on this GPH Special Issue. Elsa Oliveira would like to thank Jo Vearey for the countless hours spent thinking, writing and talking about sexual rights, health and the politics of knowledge production; the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) for always providing a home for critical thinking and doing; and the National Research Foundation for the time and resources to work on this special issue. Laura Murray would like to thank her colleagues at the Coletivo Puta Davida, CasaNem and Prostitution Policy Watch/Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, for years of dialogue and exchanges that both inform, and are featured in, this special issue. All special editors would like to thank the contributors to this special issue. We learned an immense amount in putting it together and are honoured to have had the opportunity to learn from and feature their important work.

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Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes

1 Different acronyms are used in different locations and movements to refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, and non-binary populations, often with the + to note that there are possibilities even beyond those named. This diversity is also reflected throughout the contributions in the Special Issue. We have chosen to use the shorter LGBTQ+ with the recognition that the + can include a multitude of possibilities.

2 Laura Murray and Richard Parker are anthropologists; Elsa Oliveira is a migration scholar; and Debolina Dutta is a legal scholar.