Samantha Majic
Samantha Majic completed her PhD in 2009 at Cornell University and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at John Jay College. Using multi-method qualitative research about sex workers’ political-organizational activities in the San Francisco Bay Area, she explores broader questions of how political activists balance revolutionary and reformist tendencies when they partner with state agencies and engage in nonprofit health and social service provision. She has contributed to books including Out of the Shadows: Woman Abuse in Ethnic, Immigrant and Aboriginal Communities and the Cambridge History of Law in the United States.
Collected Work
Sex Work Politics: From Protest to Service Provision
In Sex Work Politics, Samantha Majic investigates the way nonprofit organizations negotiate their governmental obligations while maintaining their commitment to outreach and advocacy for sex workers' rights as well as broader sociopolitical change. Drawing on multimethod qualitative research, Majic outlines the strategies that two San Francisco-based organizations use to balance the conflicting demands of service and advocacy, which include treating sex work as labor with legitimate occupational health and safety concerns, empowering their clients with civic skills to advance their political commitments outside the nonprofit organization, and conducting and publishing research and analysis to inform the public and policymakers of their constituents’ needs. Challenging the assumption that activists must “sell out” and abandon radical politics to manage formal organizations, Majic comes to the surprising conclusion that it is indeed possible to maintain effective advocacy and key social movement values, beliefs, and practices, even while partnering with government agencies.