Postdoc Q&A: Jennie Pearson

Jennie Pearson is a postdoctoral fellow working under the supervision of assistant professor Andrea Krüsi as part of the CARE study. Her research focuses on mutual aid practices and community care models among sex workers across both physical and digital spaces. Using participatory approaches, she examines how sex workers navigate and resist criminalization, surveillance, deplatforming, and labour precarity through collective forms of support.

What is the real-world impact and relevance of your research?

Sex workers in Canada continue to face disproportionate criminalization, policing, state surveillance and barriers from structural supports and labour rights. At the same time, sex work organizations, built by community to fill the gaps, are being defunded and de-prioritized while budgets for policing and carceral "anti-trafficking" initiatives continue to rise. Our collaborative projects hope to highlight, and model, the transformative potential of mutual aid and material support as a way for communities to resist criminalization and build alternative models of care and safety. 

What will you be working on during your fellowship?

During my fellowship, I will be working on a participatory action project in collaboration with local sex work organizations and activists. In the context of service closures and reduced capacity for community organizations in Vancouver, we are exploring the chronic precarity facing traditional non-profits and grassroots alternatives to community care and safety. We will be co-developing a mutual aid intervention model to support sex workers' health and safety and build capacity to sustain peer-based infrastructures of care. 

How does your work connect to the School of Criminology?

Sex work scholarship is inherently interdisciplinary. Sex worker liberation lives at the intersections of labour rights, bodily autonomy, anti-carcerality, and much more. Much of the scholarship in the field, including that led by critical criminologists, has addressed the impacts of Canada's sex work laws and need for decriminalization. My work seeks to build on this while also highlighting the ways sex workers' resist criminalization everyday through mutual aid. 

Any collaboration you’re excited about?

We'll be working with a few local artists and activists to help build capacity within our community-based research team. Intimate Access is a mutual aid collective based on the Island that we are really looking forward to learning from! 

What excites you about joining the School of Criminology as a postdoctoral fellow?

I'm excited to connect with and work alongside some sex work scholars who I admire and have been citing for years! And also build solidarities across research fields and movements tied to abolition and social justice.