“I don’t feel studied”: Reflections on power-consciousness in action research with college student sex workers

An overarching component of PAR is that there should be participant engagement between researchers and other participants as members of a/the community under inquiry. This expectation while powerful, can also prove to be prohibitive for studies seeking to engage communities with stigmatized and/or criminalized identities, which was the case as I sought to engage a PAR methodology with college student sex workers. As such, along with study collaborators, we imagine and develop a power-conscious collaborative process that is useful for researchers wishing to embrace a collaborative ethic, when the community component of PAR might be unsuitable or unattainable. Specifically, this process creates conditions whereby the researcher can be cognizant of power relations and disrupt the prevalent researcher/researched dichotomy and more deeply invite subjects of research to become collaborators and share power within the inquiry.