Designing for Sex Worker Liberatory Futures
Join us on April 8 for a panel discussion about what the Internet might look like if it was designed by sex workers
What would the Internet look like if it was designed by sex workers? Taking a sex worker lens to tech ethics envisions a radically different online space. Sex workers hold unique insights into the real world impacts of platform capitalism, carceral politics, digital surveillance, and sexual gentrification. Yet sex workers face significant structural barriers to inclusion in both tech and academic spaces. This panel elevates sex worker expertise and offers new ways for regulators, ethicists, policy-makers, and technologists to think about community standards, technologies of violence, data privacy, online safety, and virtual intimacies. We will explore how we might code sex worker ethics into future design.
Speakers: Chibundo Egwuatu, Yin Q, Gabriella Garcia
Moderator: Zahra Stardust
Host: Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society
This panel will be held via Zoom on Thursday, April 8, 2021. Register for this event. Free.
Learn more about the webinar series Informal, Criminalized, Precarious: Sex Workers Organizing Against Barriers and register for other events.
About the Speakers
Chibundo Egwuatu, PhD Candidate, University of Illinois
Chibundo Egwuatu is a PhD student in Sociocultural Anthropology. Chibundo’s research interests engage with the activism of Black sex workers, (de)criminalization, and digital space.
Yin Q, Red Canary Song
Yin Q (she/they) is a queer, nonbinary Chinese American mother, Kink educator, writer/producer and sex worker rights activist. Yin’s writing can be found in AfroAsia anthology; BUST; PointMagazine; and the WeToo anthology recently published by Feminist Press. Their media work includes Mercy Mistress and Fly in Power. Yin is the founder/Creative Director of Kink Out, Body of Workers, and co-organizer with Red Canary Song.
Gabriella Garcia, Postdoctoral Fellow, NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program
Gabriella Garcia (founder, Decoding Stigma) is a writer, performer, and poetic technologist. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP), where her research focuses on the protection of radical self-expression, networked subcultures, and cybernetic intimacy. In addition to her own research, Gabriella is the current acting Managing Editor of Adjacent, ITP’s journal for emergent interactive media.
Zahra Stardust, Fellow, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society
Zahra Stardust is a former Hustler Honey, Australian Penthouse Pet and Feminist Porn Awards Heartthrob of the Year. Her PhD research explored the regulation, ethics and interventions of independent queer and feminist pornographies. She is a stripper, lawyer and academic and has written numerous book chapters, journal articles and media on the sexuality, criminal law, human rights, public health and labor organising.