Summary

The material environment of sex workplaces, particularly sex workers’ needs and desires surrounding their places of work, are elusive within scholarship. Research conjoining sex work and place is largely absent across disciplines, despite widespread scholarship demonstrating that outdoor sex work has much higher risks including violence, while sex workers employed in studios, brothels, and their own homes experience enhanced quality of life, self-esteem, and workplace happiness. In the face of on-going violence towards Canadian sex workers, addressing the place of sex work is a critical undertaking of social work praxis.  In this study, nine sex workers in Calgary, Canada, undertook multisensory arts-based fieldwork and go-along interviews to explicate their everyday workplace experiences. They analyzed their sensory fieldnotes by remixing these explorations into digital animation shorts (SensAtions) that share their workplace experiences and imaginations of future supportive workplaces. The audio tracks include storytelling narratives, soundscapes, and music. The SensAtions elucidate the possibilities of sensory and arts-based ethnographic fieldwork in understanding un-just environments. Together, the Sensation films offer a powerful multisensory method for overlaying visual, aural, and haptic fieldwork materials to analyze and communicate embodied experiences of stigmatized everyday places.  For SWSD, the SensAtion films are remixed into a ten-minute digital short demonstrating how sensory and arts-based ethnographic fieldwork can be activated via animation and story to understanding and communicate lived experience of everyday places and sensed atmospheres. In watching the SensAtion films, social work practitioners can feel and imagine the experiences of gender and sexually diverse clients. The SensAtion films demonstrate how social work researchers and practitioners can collaborate with marginalized clients, fostering social empathy and motivating action towards social justice. Using affective narratives, SensAtions challenge the underlying justifications for inequitable social conditions.

Keywords (separate with commas)

Gender, Sexuality, Sex Work, Spatial Justice, Emancipatory Praxis