Paper short abstract:

This paper illuminates the conflicts that outreach workers contend with as they attempt to build relations of trust with their fellow sex workers at the same time as more aggressive surveillance procedures, like the introduction of biometric registration protocols, impart relations of distrust

Paper long abstract:

In recent times, community outreach workers serving sex workers in Kenya have been caught between two competing approaches: 1) an entrenched history of laboratory science and biomedical 'solutions' to STI prevention, treatment, and care led by Canadian academics—tracing back to chancroid studies in the 1980s and continuing today with respect to building blood repositories and phylogenetic exploration, and 2) newer discourses emanating from the Gates Foundation via a "South-to-South" collaboration that stress community-level surveillance and evidentiary procedures in the implementation of STI interventions. This paper illuminates the conflicts that these outreach workers contend with as they attempt to build relations of trust with their fellow sex workers at the same time as new and more aggressive surveillance procedures, like the introduction of biometric registration protocols, impart relations of distrust. In the name of greater accountability to funders, emerging juridical-like relations between clinicians and sex workers greatly undermine the abilities of these outreach workers to enact forms of care that sex workers deem to be crucial to the wellbeing of their community.