Collaborative Research Networks (CRNs) play a vital role within the Law and Society Association’s broader intellectual communities. CRNs provide a platform for LSA members to connect, exchange ideas, and collaborate with other scholars who share common interests. Through these networks, members not only organize sessions at the LSA Annual Meeting but also develop cross-disciplinary and cross-national research projects. CRNs help build deeper intellectual and professional connections among scholars, helping build a stronger sense of community within LSA and encouraging meaningful research collaborations.
CRNs can be based on a particular region (e.g., African Law and Society, East Asian Law and Society, South Asia), methodology (e.g., Critical Research on Race and the Law, Feminist Legal Theory), or subject area (e.g., Biotechnology, Bioethics and the Law, Citizenship and Immigration, Labor Rights, Regulatory Governance). Themes can be narrow or broad in scope.
For our new CRN Spotlight series, LSA will periodically showcase one of our 50+ Collaborative Research Networks. Read on to learn more about CRN 6: Sex, Work, Law and Society.
Every year, scholars from around the globe descend upon a new city to talk about ideas and learn something new. Notebooks and tablets in hand, they mingle over coffee and tea before taking their seats and absorbing new information that promises to expand their perspectives and enhance their research agendas.
Their lecturers are unconventional and diverse—senior home residents in Mexico, migrant organizers in Canada, Black and trans activists in the United States. They all share one thing in common, however: they are all sex workers. Despite the inherent risk, these individuals welcome researchers into their carefully constructed safe spaces to share the truth of their lives—good, bad, and ugly.
University of North Carolina Wilmington Assistant Professor Menaka Raguparan does not take this for granted. For over a decade, she has been entrusted with the stories of sex workers craving, like everybody else, to be seen and understood.
“‘We’ll tell you the happy and sappy story. You use your smarts to retell our stories to the rest of the world the right way,’” she says, referencing the mandate she has received from the community over the years. “I always call it a blessing and a privilege to be so trusted.”
“I’ve always stayed intact with the community, right from my undergraduate days…I’m making sure I’m not speaking on behalf of them, but that I am just a platform where they can use me…because I have access to all these venues.”
One of these venues is the LSA Annual Meeting, where she and the Collaborative Research Network she started, CRN 6: Sex, Work, Law, and Society, hold multiple panels for scholars of sex work and related fields each year. Their programming is anything but salacious or sensationalistic; after all, CRN 6 members see sex work as, well, work. Examining the intersection between the two, they explore how sexuality is regulated in the workplace and how working conditions differ for those in the sex industry vs. the mainstream workforce. Some members are sex workers themselves; most refer to themselves as “critical sex work scholars,” arguing against the conflation of “sex work” and “sexual exploitation.”
“Sex workers…have a greater level of autonomy and understanding. They know what their work is. They are also savvy in getting away from troubling situations,” Dr. Raguparan explains. “It’s the vulnerable people who get caught into trafficking and get exploited. By targeting sex workers who are savvy, we’re missing the vulnerable population that really needs state assistance.”
Sex work research hasn’t always held a prominent spot in LSA programming, mind you. In 2016, Dr. Raguparan, then a passionate graduate student, complained so vocally and persistently about the peripheral treatment of her subject, often folded into broader panels on feminism and labor, that she evoked exasperated murmurs from other attendees, with one saying, “If you don’t like it, change it.” So, she did.
“I went back home and immediately started writing a proposal,” she says. With support from fellow sex work researchers, mentors, and friends, she submitted an application to form CRN 6 that same summer—then braced herself for seemingly inevitable pushback.
“We thought [LSA] would come up with suggestions of, like, collaborating with Feminist Legal Theory, or some other compromise,” Dr. Raguparan recalled.
But the pushback never came. Instead, CRN 6 made its LSA debut at the 2017 Annual Meeting in Mexico City, with seven panels, 60 members, and the seeds of a fruitful culture of collaboration with sex work communities. Nearly a decade later, CRN 6 has consistently proven its subject’s “main character” status. Now boasting a membership of more than 200 scholars, CRN 6 regularly collaborates with groups such as CRN 22: South Asia and CRN 8: Labor Rights, holds yearly business meetings and panels, runs a popular monthly newsletter featuring a highly-coveted publication list, and, most importantly, creates opportunities for sex workers to speak for themselves, on their own terms, to a larger audience.
The most prominent of these opportunities is CRN 6’s flagship yearly event, the “Day of Dialogue (DoD).” Held in conjunction with the LSA Annual Meeting, the event unites CRN members with local sex work organizations, who then educate the scholars on their community’s needs and experiences, while advising them, especially non-sex workers, on best practices for effectively and ethically studying their population.
“We usually liaise with the community months in advance, and we always give free reign to them entirely. ‘You drive the conversation, you drive everything. We are here to really give you the audience,’” Dr. Raguparan explains.
Organizations have taken full advantage of this freedom, holding panel sessions, sharing videos, and even creating roleplay exercises.
“Sex workers have run simulations where…academics play the role of a sex worker and you’re coming to a bank asking for a loan,” Dr. Raguparan says, “and then sex workers are the bank managers who deny the loan and provide justifications for rejecting the loan application.”
Attendees, no matter how long they have been in the field, always come away with surprising information, or even just information that they hadn’t considered. The “world’s oldest profession” has always been uniquely vulnerable to the events and social changes of a given era. Overturned abortion laws in the United States, for instance, have introduced significant complications for sex workers in impacted regions. The Covid-19 pandemic sidelined people in the sex industry, too, but without the benefit of financial assistance or designation as “essential workers.”
Dr. Raguparan, for her part, never ceases to be shocked by the generosity and hospitality of sex work communities she has worked with. At the first (then unnamed) Day of Dialogue event in Mexico City, Dr. Raguparan and CRN 6 were warmly received by Casa Xochiquetzal, a home for senior sex workers, former and current.
“Some of the sex workers were in their seventies and eighties…former and current sex workers who serviced their ‘regular’ clientele…there were a few male sex workers too. The cutest place under the sun…they were living together as a community. Because of the stigma of sex work…their children have disowned them,” Dr. Raguparan explains. “They took a group of CRN 6 members on a tour of their house, and we got to hang out with them. A couple of the residents of Casa Xochiquetzal joined us for dinner, and they showed me how to drink beer the proper way.”
Dr. Raguparan was sheepish to “only” have a $3,000 donation to offer, despite her assertive efforts to get colleagues to donate more. But, with the local exchange rate, Xochiquetzal had 14,000-15,000 pesos to replace their recently-broken, lone washing machine with two new ones—a godsend in a shared home full of working seniors.
Since Mexico City, CRN 6 has only skipped Day of Dialogue once—in Puerto Rico, where language barriers and local safety issues prevented Dr. Raguparan from connecting with groups in the area. In Toronto, they met with Butterfly and the Sex Workers’ Rights Advocacy Network (SWAN), two organizations serving migrant sex workers. In Washington, DC, they met with Honoring Individual Power and Strength (HIPS), an organization for Black, trans sex workers. In Denver, they worked with an interconnected web of groups providing emergency funding, sex positive holistic healing, and/or additional direct services for sex workers: Rocky Mountain Sex Worker Coalition, Black Sex Workers of Colorado, Chrysalis House LCA, and the Lysistrata Mutual Care Collective and Fund. In Lisbon, they met with the European Sex Worker Alliance (ESWA) in collaboration with the Portugal Activist Group on Treatments (GAT), Agencia Piaget para o Desenvolvimento (APDES), and Movimento dxs Trabalhadorxs do Sexo (MTS). Most recently, they met with Equality Illinois and Taskforce Prevention and Community Services in Chicago. Each year, the CRN is able to offer $2,000-3,000 in donations.
These donations have been helpful to the organizations, but money remains a fundamental obstacle for CRN 6. Day of Dialogue events often launch ongoing intellectual relationships, but sex workers who are invited to participate on panels at LSA can’t always afford to attend. While LSA is able to waive registration fees for these participants, other travel expenses often prove insurmountable. Individual sponsorships have helped; one Australian faculty member paid for his co-presenter, a sex worker from Montreal, to attend LSA and present their work, while a senior researcher sponsored three or four different women before her recent retirement.
“She was like our sugar mommy,” Dr. Raguparan quips.
But as CRN 6’s network continues to expand, so too does the desire for, not just further collaboration, but also straightforward connection. So when news of LSA’s 2026 Advance Grant application crossed the desk of Brock University Professor Julie Ham, one of Dr. Raguparan’s CRN 6 co-chairs, she got to work.
Now that the initial surprise has subsided, the answer is obvious. They are going to throw the biggest Day of Dialogue so far—in San Francisco, a city with a rich history of queer, countercultural activism, and the location of the 2026 LSA Annual Meeting. Since Dr. Raguparan and Professor Ham were in San Francisco for a different conference last year, they were able to start planning earlier than usual, meeting with various groups in the area. The extra time and larger budget means that this year’s event will feature multiple organizations from both northern and southern California, such as DecrimSexWorkCA, Bay Area Workers Support (BAWS), Sex Workers’ Outreach Project – Los Angeles (SWOP LA), and the Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking – Los Angeles (Cast LA). With help from graduate student members of the CRN, some of whom are sex workers with their own connections, Dr. Raguparan expects a large turnout.
“We are hoping this year in San Francisco its going to be a collective of all sex workers from all the different groups that we have worked with so far,” she says. “At least one person from each will be able to come back, like a reunion.”
CRN 6 has never thrown an event of this scale—but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t required a ton of work over the years. Fortunately, Dr. Raguparan has the support of her four co-chairs: Julie Ham, Alex Nelson (University of Indianapolis), Kathryn Hausbeck Korgan (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), and Cherisse Francis (St. Mary’s University), as well as the many different volunteers over the years who have helped with DoD. Dr. Raguparan gives a special mention to University of Waterloo Professor Rashmee Singh, who facilitated the event in Chicago. Together, they maintain a feminist, collaborative leadership approach that privileges member input and feedback. This strategy includes a goal to always ensure that at least one co-chair is a sex worker.
“The co-chairs are very close,” says Dr. Raguparan. “We rely on each other for mentoring and troubleshooting and putting out fires.”
The at-times heavy workload, along with the challenge of juggling multiple time zones, means that co-chairs have had a fair amount of turnover through the years. To address this, CRN leaders are always keeping their eyes peeled for future recruits.
Willingness to follow through is a critical trait for anyone interested in building a life studying sex work—not only because of the importance of earning and maintaining trust among the population, but also because of the sheer persistence required to learn about and amplify the voices of people that mainstream culture seems committed to misunderstanding.
“There has been sex work scholarship happening for a long time. Scholars like Fran Shaver, Barb Brents, Kamala Kempadoo, all retired now, were doing this work for decades before I got into this field,” says Dr. Raguparan. “I am in awe of their work. Collectively they experienced many political setbacks in their efforts to decriminalize sex work, and still they were always ready for a fight, and to keep fighting…That’s the motivation that keeps me going every day in this job, every waking minute.”
That persistence, along with the generosity of countless sex workers across the globe, has established the foundation for a growing international community of workers and academics to support one another through the struggle for understanding, safety, and freedom—one day at a time.