"We come together as one...and hope for solidarity to live on"

Abstract

On the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers (IDEVASW), sex worker rights advocates and support services commemorate lives lost due to violence. In this paper we describe and reflect on a Feminist Participatory Action Research project that supported the activities of IDEVASW over two years in North East England. Working alongside a charity that provides services to women who are sex workers or have experienced sexual exploitation, we coorganised the first activist march on the day. As researchers and service providers, we present detailed reflections on the use of digital technologies during the public activist march, a private service for commemoration, and the development of a semi-public archive to collect experiences of the day. We develop three implications for the design of digital technologies for activism and the commemoration of lost lives: as catalysts for reflection and opportunities to layer experience.

On Activism and Academia

“…Our concern here, however, is with work that explicitly embraces cooperation with activists or aims to make a direct contribution to social change, blurring the lines between activism and academia. Over the last decade a growing number of researchers have engaged in such explicitly activism-leaning HCI studies and design work on issues ranging from homelessness (e.g., [98]), women's health (e.g., [149]) and labour conditions in the digital economy (e.g., [94]), solidarity economies [157], technofeminism practices [135] or activism in Transgender communities [99], or the role of technologies in improving working conditions for sex workers (e.g., [139,140]) and explicitly activist practices of doing this kind of work [143]. Often this work applies one of the above mentioned methodologies such as PD.…”

Unaccompanied Migrant Youth and Mental Health Technologies: A Social-Ecological Approach to Understanding and Designing

“…Work such as [57,74] highlight how technologies may be used to share experiences for the purpose of laying the foundations for activism and political debates and for catalyzing activist initiatives. In this context, technological solutions could build on participants' wishes to anonymously discuss their experiences and mental health stressors with others.…”

Quilting Research

“…While other work of mine has been more explicitly political (e.g. see Strohmayer et al , 2020, the work described in this book represents a prefigurative approach to doing research with third sector organisations to move towards more just worlds from a more holistic and subversive perspective. Taking inspiration from theoretical understandings of design, as well as Law's (2004) call to make the hinterland of research more visible, has led me to think about what it means to engage in a praxis of hope with third sector organisations as part of the process involved in meaningful action and design processes; how it relates to traditional design research; and what this looked like in the mundanity of research practice (as it relates to data collection, data analysis, and the publishing of results).…”

“…And this is one way of looking at relations, not the only one"-in a way, the quilt is a physical manifestation of this. The women who made it were able to build relations with one another and their support workers through the process of making it; they were also able to build relationships with me, as I refer to briefly in later work I carried out with the same charity (Strohmayer et al 2020).…”

“…This refers to another project I was working on with Changing Lives in 2016-2017 to explore their current use, and potential future uses, of digital technologies to commemorate International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. For more information, seeStrohmayer (2019);Strohmayer et al (2020).3 QUILTING RESEARCH…”