ABSTRACT
This chapter considers knowledge about sex work produced by collaborative and participatory research, with reference to the example of New Zealand. It expresses the important factors that have contributed to the hegemony of knowledge produced by collaborative and participatory research with sex workers in New Zealand since the late 1980s. The chapter explores how collaborative and participatory research norms informed a conflation of ethical and epistemological claims about sex work research and privileged the 'New Zealand Prostitutes' Collective' (NZPC) as central to knowledge production about sex work in New Zealand. Public health research provides the largest, most well-resourced studies of sex work in New Zealand, and has been closely aligned with policy development. Feminist criminologist Jan Jordan has been the main scholar to study sex work in New Zealand outside of a public health setting. The 'unfortunate experiment' at National Women's Hospital highlighted women's vulnerability in traditional health research and led to the formalisation of research ethics committees.
