The Impact of Austerity

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In May 2019, SWARM hosted a three day festival to celebrate ten years of organising. This included panel discussions across a wide range of topics that impact on sex workers, and which connect and intersect with sex worker rights organising as well as broader struggles for justice. The conversations and discussions from that festival lay the groundwork for the Decriminalised Futures project.

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The Impact of Austerity (May 2019)

In a landscape of increasing austerity and rising poverty, this panel delved into how austerity harms sex workers, women of colour and families across the UK. It asked the question: are austerity policies themselves acts of violence?

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Transcript

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Speakers: Mercredi Addams (SWARM), Sara Callaway (Global Women’s Strike), Cari Mitchell (English Collective of Prostitutes), Kimberly McIntosh (Runnymede Trust), Dr Vickie Cooper

Credits: Composition by Anita Castelino and Sherry Ostapovitch, mix by Sherry Ostapovitch, edit by Tamara Schreiber and Radio Ava, recording by Hollis Robin.

The Impact of Austerity is the 5th panel discussion of the SWARM 2019 Festival of Resistance.

The topics included:

  • Imagining Feminist Futures

  • Radical Transfeminist Activism

  • Cops Don’t Keep Us Safe: When Survival Is Made Criminal

  • Sex Work and Migration in Europe

  • The Impact of Austerity

  • Sex Workers of Colour Roundtable

  • (Resisting) Systems of Violence

  • Sex Workers on the Nordic Model

  • Artists Talk Bodies, Visibility, and Violence

  • Radical Histories: Exploring the Archives

  • Aesthetics vs Ethics: Expanding Definitions of Feminist Porn

  • How Do Disability and Sex Work Intersect in the UK Today

  • The Future of Work

  • Technology, Surveillance and the State: How We Resist

  • Examining Anti-trafficking Measures: Academic Perspectives

  • Researching Sex Work

  • Strength, Resilience, and Healthcare

  • A Decriminalised Future

Year: 2019
Type: panel discussion
Series: swarm festival of resistance
Subject(s): austerity poverty