CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Simister, Ruth Mary |
|---|---|
| Title | Responding to Precarity: Sex Worker Peer Education in an Accra Slum |
| Summary | Peer education is a popular tool of public health programming. In interventions targeting sex workers, former sex workers are often thought to be the most effective at identifying and supporting this population. There is little understanding, however, of what conceptual and practical strategies sex workers-turned peer educators use in their work, with what effect, and how these are situated within a specific context. These themes were explored using a participatory action research method, photovoice, with peer educators who live and/or work in Old Fadama, an illegal settlement in Accra, Ghana. This method was complemented by ethnographic research with women sex workers in Old Fadama and during activities of non-governmental organizations Theatre for a Change Ghana and Prolink. I characterize work, space and life in Old Fadama as produced and maintained by techniques of governmental precarization (Lorey 2011). I argue that sex workers’ embodied lives are made acutely precarious in Butler’s (2009) sense of being “differentially exposed to injury, violence and death” due to criminalization, stigma and the state’s non-recognition of Old Fadama. Furthermore, this research found that peer educators respond to precarity via strategies of career management; spatialization; and development of an intersubjective embodiment of care. I argue that these responses have an ambiguous impact upon the conditions of precarity. These findings contribute to understandings of peer education in sexual and reproductive health programmes; of work in the slum economy; and representations of sex work in the global south. |
| Supervisor | Dafinger, Andreas; Fodor, Eva |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/simister_ruth.pdf |
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