WGSS PhD candidate Emillion Adekoya was selected – not once, but twice! – to serve as a Summer Research Fellow with the Human Sexuality Studies program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. During Summers 2023 and 2024, Emillion joined a team of researchers at the Sexuality Research Data Lab to systematically study sex work commentary on social media platforms.

The Human Sexuality Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies hosts an annual Sexuality Research Fellowship each summer. At the Sexuality Research Data Lab, fellows work collaboratively to generate research in one of the following areas: Sexuality and Housing; Family and Sexuality; Disability and Sexuality; and Sex Work. While fellows are sometimes tasked with the work of collecting and coding qualitative data and generating comprehensive data sets, they also have the opportunity to work with the existing databanks to develop new projects and collaboratively write papers.

Emillion Adekoya is a WGSS PhD candidate writing dissertation about African LGTBQ+ asylum seekers in the United States. She was selected to serve as a fellow at the Sexuality Research Data Lab in Summer 2023 and, again, in Summer 2024. Although she primarily works at the nexus of queer studies, African studies, and migration studies, Emillion is a skilled qualitative researcher committed to learning new methods and engaging in collaborative research projects.

Consequently, she jumped at the opportunity to work with the Sexuality Research Lab. During her first summer, Emillion worked with an interdisciplinary team of faculty and graduate students to compile a comprehensive data set cataloging sex work commentary on social media, with a focus on Reddit, TikTok, Twitter (aka “X”), and YouTube. The finished databank – “The Cyberseduce Collection: Sex Work Commentary on Major Social Platforms“ – contains nearly 6,000 data entries and has already been downloaded over 200 times and cited over 30 times.

Emillion was invited to return to the Sexuality Research Data Lab the following summer. This time, she collaborated with a research team to write an article based on “the sex work databank.” Her co-authored article is forthcoming in the Journal of Social Media in Society. Stay tuned for this terrific piece!