Professor Teela Sanders, Co Chair

Professor of Criminology 

​Teela Sanders is a Professor of Criminology at the University of Leicester. She is a leading international scholar in research on the intersections between gender, regulation, governance and crime, specifically in the sex industry. Sanders has written 7 books (including a Pivot in 2018), edited 8 collections, and has over 50 peer reviewed journal articles, based on research projects funded from major research councils. The current Economic and Social Research Council study, Beyond the Gaze, on internet sex work has created some of the largest datasets in the world, and outcomes have involved practitioners good practice, safety resources for sex workers and police and practitioner training. She is currently working on a Home Office project of corrosive substance crime and with a sex work project in Nairobi. Teela holds a Leverhulme Research Fellowship on a restudy of brothels until 2021.

Professor Nick Mai, Co Chair

Professor of Sociology and Migration Studies

Nick Mai is a sociologist, an ethnographer and a filmmaker whose writing and films focus on the experiences and representations of migrants working in the sex industry. Through participative ethnographic films and original research findings Nick challenges prevailing representation of the encounter between migration and sex work in terms of trafficking, while focusing on the ambivalent dynamics of exploitation and agency that are implicated. 
In 2016, Nick was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant (Sexual Humanitarianism: Migration, Sex Work and Trafficking - 2016-2020) to study impact of anti-trafficking legislation and initiatives on the governance of migration and on the sex industry in the global North by analysing migrant's own understandings and experiences of agency and exploitation in Australia, France, New Zealand and the US. 

Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon

Reader in Psychology and Social Policy

Belinda's research addresses the socio-cultural, psychological, philosophical and human rights issues which surround sexual and gendered behaviour. The majority of this work has been funded by the ESRC (although early work was funded by the Wingate Fellowship and the Ian Karten Educational Trust) and carried out with co-operation of the Metropolitan Police Clubs and Vice Unit.
Belinda has also completed four systematic reviews of psychological interventions for adults and juveniles convicted of sexual offences. These reviews were funded by the Department of Health R&D in Forensic Mental Health and carried out with Charlotte Bilby.

Dr Rachel Stuart 

Lecturer in Criminology 

Using feminist methodologies, Rachel has conducted a series of in-depth interviews with female webcam performers, along with industry insiders to explore this under researched area of the sex industry. This is ground breaking research because, despite the industry being several decades old, there has been very little academic, legal or feminist engagement with this area of sexual commerce.

Professor Jane Scoular 

Professor of Criminology 

Jane is a socio-legal scholar working across issues relating to law and gender and sexuality. Her work is a primary reference in the field of the legal regulation of commercial sex. Scholarship includes original theoretical expositions in books and internationally peer-refereed journals as well as ground-breaking national and international empirical studies, funded by the government and by bodies such as the ESRC and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Her work has influenced both academic and policy debate and law reform. She is currently working on an ESRC funded project (>£600,000 ) on internet-based sex work and its regulation.

Professor Maggie O'Neill 

Professor of Sociology 

Maggie is Professor in Sociology at University College Cork and a member of the Centre for the Study of the Moral Foundations of Economy and Society.  Before joining UCC  she was Chair in Sociology & Criminology in the Department of Sociology at the University of York, and Professor in Criminology at the University of Durham and Principal of Ustinov College. participatory action research with sex workers and was awarded in 1996. The majority of the empirical research Maggie has conducted uses participatory action research, ethnographic and biographical methods and participatory arts. She has a long history of working with artists and community groups to conduct arts based research-working together to create change; and social justice is at the core of her work.

Dr Kate Lister 

Lecturer in Arts and Communication 

Kate Lister is a lecturer in the School of Arts and Communication at Leeds Trinity University. Kate primarily researches the literary history of sex work and curates the online research project, Whores of Yore, an interdisciplinary digital archive for the study of historical sexuality. Kate has also published in the medical humanities, material culture, Victorian studies and Neo-Medievalism. She regularly writes about the history of sexuality for inews, Vice, and the Wellcome Trust. Kate won the Sexual Freedom Publicist of the Year Award in 2017.