Jessica Van Meir

Jessica Van Meir (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and an Ashford Scholar. Her research focuses on the sex workers' rights movement in Latin America, comparing the cases of Colombia, Guatemala, Argentina, and Ecuador to ask when countries recognize sex work as labor.  Comparing the sex workers' rights movement with the domestic workers' rights movement, she argues that sex workers have had less success in obtaining labor rights due to conflicting feminist views about prostitution as violence against women.

Jessica began her research career at Duke as a research assistant for Dr. Judith Kelley's book on US influence on international human trafficking policy, Scorecard Diplomacy. For her honors thesis, she conducted interviews with sex workers in Argentina and Ecuador and analyzed how government regulation of their workspaces impacted their working conditions. She continued this work as a Gates Cambridge Scholar.

Outside of academia, Jessica has worked in politics and the law as a Legislative Fellow for Congresswoman Deborah Ross, a Regional Field Director for Stacey Abrams' 2018 campaign for Governor of Georgia, and a Senior Legal Analyst for feminist law firm McAllister Olivarius. She is also the cofounder of MintStars, a content platform to protect adult content creators from financial discrimination and censorship, and a founding member of the Boston Sex Workers and Allies Collective (BSWAC), which advocates for the full decriminalization of sex work in Massachusetts.

Jessica has an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge and a BA in Public Policy from Duke University.

Research Interests: informal labor, comparative politics, gender and sexuality, social movements, Latin America