Project description
Sex work and changing entertainment in urban economies
Tourism- and entertainment-oriented urban economies rely on complex labour organisation, including legal, unregulated or illegal labour. Nevertheless, sex work’s role in the construction of urban brands and dealing with urban transformation and decline is overlooked. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the GLOWS project conducts ethnographic research in Las Vegas (United States) and the Adriatic Tourist District (Italy). In doing so, it endeavours to identify the mechanisms through which unregulated/illegal labour practices become part of urban brand-making and the effects of urban change and decline on sex workers. Highlighting the voices of sex workers in the context of urban economic change may lead to the reformulation of the conceptualisation of urban transformation from a policy and theoretical perspective.
Objective
GLOWS–When the Lights Go Out: Sex Work(ers) in the decay of urban entertainment–is a qualitative research project that interrogates the dialectic between sex work and tourism-led, entertainment-driven urban economies during periods of decline or rebranding.
The travel and tourism sector accounts for nearly 10% of global GDP, making tourism and city branding central pillars of urban policy worldwide. In the global competition to attract people and capital, urban economies depend on the labour of both formal and informal/illegal workers. Yet, despite expanding scholarship on urban branding and informality, the role of informal/illegal labour—particularly sex work—within these economies of attraction remains underexplored. Sex workers are frequently portrayed as symbols of urban deviance and decline, yet rarely positioned as agents whose labour sustains captivating urban imaginaries and whose lives are affected by transformations in entertainment-driven cities. GLOWS addresses these gaps by focusing on two case studies: Las Vegas, USA, and the Adriatic Tourist District, Italy—two contexts where sex work is illegal or formally unrecognized yet central to local imaginaries. Through ethnographic methods, the project pursues three objectives: 1) to advance a critical understanding of how sexual commerce has been both mobilized within, and adapted to, urban branding strategies in the two case study locations; 2) to analyse how urban transformations, whether through rebranding or decline, shape sex workers’ everyday lives; and 3) to examine how sex workers’ perspectives challenge dominant visual representations of the two contexts.
By centring sex workers’ situated knowledge, GLOWS bridges conversations in urban studies on attractiveness and branding, ruin and decay, geographies of sexuality, and informal/illegal economies. While these domains are often address separately they share important stakes in understanding the contradictions of contemporary urban transformation.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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10129 Torino
Italy
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