Samantha Majic
Biographic Data
| ID | 325976 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Samantha Majic |
| GIVEN NAMES | Samantha |
| FAMILY NAME | Majic |
| SIGNATURE | MAJIC S |
| AFFILIATIONS | City University of New York |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5956-6506 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 130 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Sex Workers, Online Platforms, and Deplatforming
Online platforms exert significant power: While offering users opportunities to earn income, they may easily deplatform them by removing their accounts for breaking platform rules. Policy feedback literature and analyses of survey and in-depth interview data about US-based sex workers’ online platform experiences illuminates how users may respond to this platform policy. Sex workers offer a particularly instructive case because, while all workers…
Response to Elena Shih’s Review of Lights, Camera, Feminism? Celebrities and Anti-trafficking Politics
anti-trafficking scholarship a clearer view of the possibilities of celebrity activism and how celebrities might be mobilized in a greater need for collective action
The Biggest Decision of Your Life(Time)? Examining the Politics of Married at First Sight
Lifetime’s “Married at First Sight” (MAFS) aired its seventeenth season in 2024, averaging 2.58 million viewers per weekly episode. In this paper, we ask, how does MAFS reflect and intervene in contemporary marriage politics, particularly regarding race, gender, class, and sexuality in the U.S.? To answer this question, we draw on scholarship about marriage as a political institution, and on reality TV as a window into contemporary socio-economic…
Sex Workers Cannot Be Wrong: Engaging and Negotiating Online Platform Power
Online platforms shape and facilitate our social, economic, and political activities. Sex workers have long pioneered their use for advertising, providing services, screening clients, collecting payments, and peer-interaction, among other activities. To learn more about the platforms sex workers use and how they engage and resist platforms' power, we consider the following questions: How and to what extent do sex workers engage with online platfo…
Re-thinking vulnerability: Research fraud and bureaucratic harm in community-engaged online research
Vulnerability - understood broadly as susceptibility to harm - factors into many social science research projects, including those that are qualitative, involve collaborations between scholars and members of the group under study, and engage with online research techniques and technologies. However, guidance for how researchers and communities may understand, navigate, and mitigate vulnerability in such projects is often scattered across discipli…
Lights, Camera, Feminism?: Celebrities and Anti-trafficking Politics
Celebrities in the United States have drawn significant attention and resources to the complex issue of human trafficking—a subject of feminist concern—and they are often criticized for promoting sensationalized and simplistic understandings of the issue. In this comprehensive analysis of celebrities’ anti-trafficking activism, however, Samantha Majic finds that this phenomenon is more nuanced: even as some celebrities promote regressive issue na…
The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations: Insights and Implications
In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked ser…
Migrant Crossings: Witnessing Human Trafficking in the U.S
Same Same but Different? Gender, sex work, and respectability politics in the MyRedBook and Rentboy closures
Among the many policies implemented to eradicate trafficking in the sex industry, US government agencies have targeted online platforms that market and facilitate sex work. In this paper, I consider two instances of this activity: the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2014 raid and subsequent closing of MyRedbook.com, and the Department of Homeland Security’s 2015 raid and closing of Rentboy.com. Drawing from a qualitative-interpretive analysis o…
Celebrity and Politics
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button
Mixed methods and visibility politics in When States Come Out
Philip Ayoub’s When States Come Out: Europe's Sexual Minorities and the Politics of Visibility (2016) examines the diffusion of LGBT rights norms across Europe from 1990 to 2010. Drawing from exten
Publicizing the (In)visible? Celebrities, Anti-Human Trafficking Activism, and Feminist Ideologies
This article examines celebrities’ anti-human trafficking activism from 2000 to 2016 to interpret how they use their fame and personal experiences to publicize feminist issues. Drawing from an original dataset, I argue first that celebrities represent human trafficking in ways that circulate various feminist ideologies. Next, I juxtapose Ashley Judd and Jada Pinkett Smith to examine how individual celebrities adopt, reflect, and complicate these …
Real men set norms? Anti-trafficking campaigns and the limits of celebrity norm entrepreneurship
This article analyzes celebrities’ norm entrepreneurship through a specific instance of its enactment: Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s media campaign against human trafficking (the K&M Campaign). Drawing from literatures about celebrities and politics and norm entrepreneurship, and using qualitative-interpretive methods of data collection and analysis, I show how the K&M Campaign provides an early, high-profile example of this norm entrepreneursh…
Participating, Observing, Publishing: Lessons from the Field
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Sending a Dear John Letter: Public Information Campaigns and the Movement to "End Demand" for Prostitution in Atlanta, GA
This paper examines "Dear John", a public information campaign that ran from 2006-2008 in Atlanta, GA, to ask what narrative it conveys about commercial sex and those who engage in it, in order to understand the gendered (and other) discursive constructions it produces, reflects, and complicates about these activities and subjects. Drawing from both policy and sex work/trafficking scholarship, this paper argues that Dear John used symbolic images…
Implementing ‘new’ norms? Examining ‘john school’ policies in the United States
In the United States, norms are located in the foreground of policy debates. To consider how they inform and emerge through policies, this paper examines ‘john schools,’ where men arrested for prostitution solicitation attend a class to learn about the consequences of their actions. Based on multimethod qualitative research with two john schools (Project Respect, in Brooklyn, NY, and the Offender Program in Phoenix, AZ), I argue that normative di…
I’m Just a Woman. But I’ve Never Been a Victim”: Re-conceptualizing Prostitution Policy through Individual Narratives
Drawing on narrative theory in political science and policy studies, this article argues that narratives serve definitional purposes in the prostitution policy process, but not all narratives are equally influential here. To illustrate, it shares Gloria Lockett’s narrative. Lockett is a 65-year-old African American former sex worker, prostitutes’ rights activist, and the cofounder and the current executive director of the California Prostitutes E…
Negotiating Sex Work: Unintended Consequences of Policy and Activism
Negotiating Sex Work provides a timely and necessary intervention in to current public and political debates about sex work, debates which are primarily divided between those who view selling sexual services as legitimate work, and those who view it as a form of coercive sexual exploitation (or sex trafficking). By presenting scholarship from a range of countries and disciplinary and methodological traditions, this book intervenes in this long-st…
Sex Work Politics: From Protest to Service Provision
List of Abbreviations Chapter 1. Institutional Negotiation: Sex Workers and the Process of Resistance Maintenance Chapter 2. Oppositional Implementation Chapter 3. Community Engagement Chapter 4. Claims-Making Activities Chapter 5. Lessons Learned: Social-Movement Evolution and the Nonprofit Sector Appendix.
Teaching Equality? “John Schools,” Gender, and Institutional Reform
Employing feminist institutionalism as an analytic framework, this article considers the First Offender Prostitution Program in San Francisco. The program allows men arrested for their first prostitution offense to pay a fine and to attend a day of classes about the consequences of participation in prostitution, in lieu of prosecution. Other jurisdictions in the United States and internationally have replicated First Offender, and supporters (par…
Participation Despite the Odds: Examining Sex Workers’ Political Engagement
This article considers the following question: given sex workers’ barriers to participation, how do they engage in political life, if at all? To answer this, I draw on semistructured open-ended interviews with forty adults who have supported themselves with sex work in the San Francisco Bay Area. While these individuals do not represent all sex workers in the United States, they exhibit a variety of capacities and methods for expressing their voi…
Beyond 'Victim-Criminals: Sex Workers, Nonprofit Organizations, and Gender Ideologies
This article examines the St. James Infirmary (SJI), a nonprofit occupational health and safety clinic for sex workers in San Francisco, to consider how particular organizational spaces and practices may challenge gender ideologies in the United States-in this case, of women sex workers as 'victim-criminals.' Drawing empirically from multimethod qualitative research and theoretically from feminist institutionalism, I indicate how the SJI's broade…
Serving Sex Workers and Promoting Democratic Engagement: Rethinking Nonprofits' Role in American Civic and Political Life
In debates about promoting civic and political engagement in America, political scientists are often skeptical about the role of nonprofit organizations offering health and social services in the US because they are constrained by the tax code and grant agreements. However, I argue that by focusing on what I term social movement-borne nonprofits, we can see how these organizations may engage (marginalized) communities and participate in political…
The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations: Insights and Implications
In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked ser…
Serving Sex Workers and Promoting Democratic Engagement: Rethinking Nonprofits' Role in American Civic and Political Life
In debates about promoting civic and political engagement in America, political scientists are often skeptical about the role of nonprofit organizations offering health and social services in the US because they are constrained by the tax code and grant agreements. However, I argue that by focusing on what I term social movement-borne nonprofits, we can see how these organizations may engage (marginalized) communities and participate in political…
Celebrity and Politics
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button
Teaching Equality? “John Schools,” Gender, and Institutional Reform
Employing feminist institutionalism as an analytic framework, this article considers the First Offender Prostitution Program in San Francisco. The program allows men arrested for their first prostitution offense to pay a fine and to attend a day of classes about the consequences of participation in prostitution, in lieu of prosecution. Other jurisdictions in the United States and internationally have replicated First Offender, and supporters (par…
Participation Despite the Odds: Examining Sex Workers’ Political Engagement
This article considers the following question: given sex workers’ barriers to participation, how do they engage in political life, if at all? To answer this, I draw on semistructured open-ended interviews with forty adults who have supported themselves with sex work in the San Francisco Bay Area. While these individuals do not represent all sex workers in the United States, they exhibit a variety of capacities and methods for expressing their voi…
Beyond 'Victim-Criminals: Sex Workers, Nonprofit Organizations, and Gender Ideologies
This article examines the St. James Infirmary (SJI), a nonprofit occupational health and safety clinic for sex workers in San Francisco, to consider how particular organizational spaces and practices may challenge gender ideologies in the United States-in this case, of women sex workers as 'victim-criminals.' Drawing empirically from multimethod qualitative research and theoretically from feminist institutionalism, I indicate how the SJI's broade…
Real men set norms? Anti-trafficking campaigns and the limits of celebrity norm entrepreneurship
This article analyzes celebrities’ norm entrepreneurship through a specific instance of its enactment: Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s media campaign against human trafficking (the K&M Campaign). Drawing from literatures about celebrities and politics and norm entrepreneurship, and using qualitative-interpretive methods of data collection and analysis, I show how the K&M Campaign provides an early, high-profile example of this norm entrepreneursh…
Sex Workers Cannot Be Wrong: Engaging and Negotiating Online Platform Power
Online platforms shape and facilitate our social, economic, and political activities. Sex workers have long pioneered their use for advertising, providing services, screening clients, collecting payments, and peer-interaction, among other activities. To learn more about the platforms sex workers use and how they engage and resist platforms' power, we consider the following questions: How and to what extent do sex workers engage with online platfo…
Same Same but Different? Gender, sex work, and respectability politics in the MyRedBook and Rentboy closures
Among the many policies implemented to eradicate trafficking in the sex industry, US government agencies have targeted online platforms that market and facilitate sex work. In this paper, I consider two instances of this activity: the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2014 raid and subsequent closing of MyRedbook.com, and the Department of Homeland Security’s 2015 raid and closing of Rentboy.com. Drawing from a qualitative-interpretive analysis o…
Implementing ‘new’ norms? Examining ‘john school’ policies in the United States
In the United States, norms are located in the foreground of policy debates. To consider how they inform and emerge through policies, this paper examines ‘john schools,’ where men arrested for prostitution solicitation attend a class to learn about the consequences of their actions. Based on multimethod qualitative research with two john schools (Project Respect, in Brooklyn, NY, and the Offender Program in Phoenix, AZ), I argue that normative di…
I’m Just a Woman. But I’ve Never Been a Victim”: Re-conceptualizing Prostitution Policy through Individual Narratives
Drawing on narrative theory in political science and policy studies, this article argues that narratives serve definitional purposes in the prostitution policy process, but not all narratives are equally influential here. To illustrate, it shares Gloria Lockett’s narrative. Lockett is a 65-year-old African American former sex worker, prostitutes’ rights activist, and the cofounder and the current executive director of the California Prostitutes E…
Re-thinking vulnerability: Research fraud and bureaucratic harm in community-engaged online research
Vulnerability - understood broadly as susceptibility to harm - factors into many social science research projects, including those that are qualitative, involve collaborations between scholars and members of the group under study, and engage with online research techniques and technologies. However, guidance for how researchers and communities may understand, navigate, and mitigate vulnerability in such projects is often scattered across discipli…
Publicizing the (In)visible? Celebrities, Anti-Human Trafficking Activism, and Feminist Ideologies
This article examines celebrities’ anti-human trafficking activism from 2000 to 2016 to interpret how they use their fame and personal experiences to publicize feminist issues. Drawing from an original dataset, I argue first that celebrities represent human trafficking in ways that circulate various feminist ideologies. Next, I juxtapose Ashley Judd and Jada Pinkett Smith to examine how individual celebrities adopt, reflect, and complicate these …
Participating, Observing, Publishing: Lessons from the Field
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Sending a Dear John Letter: Public Information Campaigns and the Movement to "End Demand" for Prostitution in Atlanta, GA
This paper examines "Dear John", a public information campaign that ran from 2006-2008 in Atlanta, GA, to ask what narrative it conveys about commercial sex and those who engage in it, in order to understand the gendered (and other) discursive constructions it produces, reflects, and complicates about these activities and subjects. Drawing from both policy and sex work/trafficking scholarship, this paper argues that Dear John used symbolic images…
Serving Sex Workers and Promoting Democratic Engagement: Rethinking Nonprofits' Role in American Civic and Political Life
In debates about promoting civic and political engagement in America, political scientists are often skeptical about the role of nonprofit organizations offering health and social services in the US because they are constrained by the tax code and grant agreements. However, I argue that by focusing on what I term social movement-borne nonprofits, we can see how these organizations may engage (marginalized) communities and participate in political…
Negotiating Sex Work: Unintended Consequences of Policy and Activism
Negotiating Sex Work provides a timely and necessary intervention in to current public and political debates about sex work, debates which are primarily divided between those who view selling sexual services as legitimate work, and those who view it as a form of coercive sexual exploitation (or sex trafficking). By presenting scholarship from a range of countries and disciplinary and methodological traditions, this book intervenes in this long-st…
Sex Work Politics: From Protest to Service Provision
List of Abbreviations Chapter 1. Institutional Negotiation: Sex Workers and the Process of Resistance Maintenance Chapter 2. Oppositional Implementation Chapter 3. Community Engagement Chapter 4. Claims-Making Activities Chapter 5. Lessons Learned: Social-Movement Evolution and the Nonprofit Sector Appendix.
Teaching Equality? “John Schools,” Gender, and Institutional Reform
Employing feminist institutionalism as an analytic framework, this article considers the First Offender Prostitution Program in San Francisco. The program allows men arrested for their first prostitution offense to pay a fine and to attend a day of classes about the consequences of participation in prostitution, in lieu of prosecution. Other jurisdictions in the United States and internationally have replicated First Offender, and supporters (par…
Participation Despite the Odds: Examining Sex Workers’ Political Engagement
This article considers the following question: given sex workers’ barriers to participation, how do they engage in political life, if at all? To answer this, I draw on semistructured open-ended interviews with forty adults who have supported themselves with sex work in the San Francisco Bay Area. While these individuals do not represent all sex workers in the United States, they exhibit a variety of capacities and methods for expressing their voi…
Beyond 'Victim-Criminals: Sex Workers, Nonprofit Organizations, and Gender Ideologies
This article examines the St. James Infirmary (SJI), a nonprofit occupational health and safety clinic for sex workers in San Francisco, to consider how particular organizational spaces and practices may challenge gender ideologies in the United States-in this case, of women sex workers as 'victim-criminals.' Drawing empirically from multimethod qualitative research and theoretically from feminist institutionalism, I indicate how the SJI's broade…
Implementing ‘new’ norms? Examining ‘john school’ policies in the United States
In the United States, norms are located in the foreground of policy debates. To consider how they inform and emerge through policies, this paper examines ‘john schools,’ where men arrested for prostitution solicitation attend a class to learn about the consequences of their actions. Based on multimethod qualitative research with two john schools (Project Respect, in Brooklyn, NY, and the Offender Program in Phoenix, AZ), I argue that normative di…
I’m Just a Woman. But I’ve Never Been a Victim”: Re-conceptualizing Prostitution Policy through Individual Narratives
Drawing on narrative theory in political science and policy studies, this article argues that narratives serve definitional purposes in the prostitution policy process, but not all narratives are equally influential here. To illustrate, it shares Gloria Lockett’s narrative. Lockett is a 65-year-old African American former sex worker, prostitutes’ rights activist, and the cofounder and the current executive director of the California Prostitutes E…
Real men set norms? Anti-trafficking campaigns and the limits of celebrity norm entrepreneurship
This article analyzes celebrities’ norm entrepreneurship through a specific instance of its enactment: Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s media campaign against human trafficking (the K&M Campaign). Drawing from literatures about celebrities and politics and norm entrepreneurship, and using qualitative-interpretive methods of data collection and analysis, I show how the K&M Campaign provides an early, high-profile example of this norm entrepreneursh…
Participating, Observing, Publishing: Lessons from the Field
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Sending a Dear John Letter: Public Information Campaigns and the Movement to "End Demand" for Prostitution in Atlanta, GA
This paper examines "Dear John", a public information campaign that ran from 2006-2008 in Atlanta, GA, to ask what narrative it conveys about commercial sex and those who engage in it, in order to understand the gendered (and other) discursive constructions it produces, reflects, and complicates about these activities and subjects. Drawing from both policy and sex work/trafficking scholarship, this paper argues that Dear John used symbolic images…
Mixed methods and visibility politics in When States Come Out
Philip Ayoub’s When States Come Out: Europe's Sexual Minorities and the Politics of Visibility (2016) examines the diffusion of LGBT rights norms across Europe from 1990 to 2010. Drawing from exten
Publicizing the (In)visible? Celebrities, Anti-Human Trafficking Activism, and Feminist Ideologies
This article examines celebrities’ anti-human trafficking activism from 2000 to 2016 to interpret how they use their fame and personal experiences to publicize feminist issues. Drawing from an original dataset, I argue first that celebrities represent human trafficking in ways that circulate various feminist ideologies. Next, I juxtapose Ashley Judd and Jada Pinkett Smith to examine how individual celebrities adopt, reflect, and complicate these …
Same Same but Different? Gender, sex work, and respectability politics in the MyRedBook and Rentboy closures
Among the many policies implemented to eradicate trafficking in the sex industry, US government agencies have targeted online platforms that market and facilitate sex work. In this paper, I consider two instances of this activity: the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2014 raid and subsequent closing of MyRedbook.com, and the Department of Homeland Security’s 2015 raid and closing of Rentboy.com. Drawing from a qualitative-interpretive analysis o…
Celebrity and Politics
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button
The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations: Insights and Implications
In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked ser…
Migrant Crossings: Witnessing Human Trafficking in the U.S
Lights, Camera, Feminism?: Celebrities and Anti-trafficking Politics
Celebrities in the United States have drawn significant attention and resources to the complex issue of human trafficking—a subject of feminist concern—and they are often criticized for promoting sensationalized and simplistic understandings of the issue. In this comprehensive analysis of celebrities’ anti-trafficking activism, however, Samantha Majic finds that this phenomenon is more nuanced: even as some celebrities promote regressive issue na…
The Biggest Decision of Your Life(Time)? Examining the Politics of Married at First Sight
Lifetime’s “Married at First Sight” (MAFS) aired its seventeenth season in 2024, averaging 2.58 million viewers per weekly episode. In this paper, we ask, how does MAFS reflect and intervene in contemporary marriage politics, particularly regarding race, gender, class, and sexuality in the U.S.? To answer this question, we draw on scholarship about marriage as a political institution, and on reality TV as a window into contemporary socio-economic…
Sex Workers Cannot Be Wrong: Engaging and Negotiating Online Platform Power
Online platforms shape and facilitate our social, economic, and political activities. Sex workers have long pioneered their use for advertising, providing services, screening clients, collecting payments, and peer-interaction, among other activities. To learn more about the platforms sex workers use and how they engage and resist platforms' power, we consider the following questions: How and to what extent do sex workers engage with online platfo…
Re-thinking vulnerability: Research fraud and bureaucratic harm in community-engaged online research
Vulnerability - understood broadly as susceptibility to harm - factors into many social science research projects, including those that are qualitative, involve collaborations between scholars and members of the group under study, and engage with online research techniques and technologies. However, guidance for how researchers and communities may understand, navigate, and mitigate vulnerability in such projects is often scattered across discipli…
Sex Workers, Online Platforms, and Deplatforming
Online platforms exert significant power: While offering users opportunities to earn income, they may easily deplatform them by removing their accounts for breaking platform rules. Policy feedback literature and analyses of survey and in-depth interview data about US-based sex workers’ online platform experiences illuminates how users may respond to this platform policy. Sex workers offer a particularly instructive case because, while all workers…
Response to Elena Shih’s Review of Lights, Camera, Feminism? Celebrities and Anti-trafficking Politics
anti-trafficking scholarship a clearer view of the possibilities of celebrity activism and how celebrities might be mobilized in a greater need for collective action
Political science (20 works) · Sex work and related issues (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (12 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Criminology (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works)