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Elle Blunt

I provide consultations for organizations seeking to expand their sex worker competency as well as sex worker sensitivity readings for academics, journalists, and organizations.

Blunt is a sex worker, community organizer, public health researcher and co-founder of Hacking//Hustling—a collective of sex workers, survivors, and accomplices working at the intersection of technology and social justice to interrupt violence facilitated by technology. Blunt’s work has always called for an interdisciplinary approach and explores the intersections of technology, labor, and public health.

Blunt is a 2021-2022 Civic Media Fellow at USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab where she is studying the financial discrimination of sex workers and Search Engine Optimization as a community organizing tool. She served as the former care coordinator to Persist Health Project, an organization that worked to bridge the gap of health and social services for folks impacted by the NYC sex trades.

Blunt has her Master’s in Public Health and leads community-based participatory research on sex work and equitable access to technology from a public health perspective. She researches the loss of online spaces for sex workers, content moderation and shadowbanning in sex work and activist communities, technologies for liberation, the financial discrimination of sex workers, and the algorithmic coding of high-risk communities.

Blunt is on the advisory board of NYC’s Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) and Berkman Klein’s Initiative for a Representative First Amendment (IfRFA). Blunt is a recipient of the 2020 Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award and Public Knowledge’s 20/20 Visionary Awards for Future Tech Policy Leaders.

As someone who has been personally and professionally harmed by current approaches to algorithmic governance and the lack of equitable access to technology, Blunt’s work is dedicated to imagining an equitable future and building the path that gets us there. Blunt’s perspective is informed by her experience as a disabled sex worker.

She enjoys redistributing money from institutions and watching her community thrive.

Looking to expand your sex worker competency?