Courtesy stigma, also referred to as ‘stigma by association’, involves public disapproval evoked as a consequence of associating with a stigmatised individual or group. While a small number of sociological studies have shown how courtesy stigma limits the social support and social opportunities available to family members of stigmatised individuals, there is a paucity of research examining courtesy stigma among the large network of people who provide health and social services to stigmatised groups. This article presents results from a mixed methods study of the workplace experiences of a purposive sample of workers in a non‐profit organisation providing services to sex workers in Canada. The findings demonstrate that courtesy stigma plays a role in workplace health as it shapes both the workplace environment, including the range of resources made available to staff to carry out their work activities, as well as staff perceptions of others’ support. At the same time, it was evident that some workers were more vulnerable to courtesy stigma than others depending on their social location. We discuss these results in light of the existing literature on courtesy stigma and conclude that it is an under‐studied determinant of workplace health among care providers serving socially denigrated groups.

The “alternative right” or “alt-right” is a quintessentially twenty-first century phenomenon: a radicalized far right ideology that is proliferated and disseminated almost exclusively online with members drawn from all over the world. This paper argues that online debates within alt-right online communities about the acceptability of alt-right language and imagery are claims-making exercises that constitute examples of bordering processes. These debates establish cultural borders around online communities and foster new virtual geographies of counter-hegemonic movements of the far right, that transcend and challenge the role and relevance of the physical border as a container for these movements. The paper concludes by placing these findings within current theoretical framings of the a-territorial border, with particular attention to what implications these have for the Pacific Northwest.

This article examines the mutability of symbolic sanctions— or stigmas—applied to sex industry work by examining newspaper narratives in one medium-sized Canadian city over two time periods: 1870–1910 and 1980–2004. The article's purpose is first to get a sense of what the authors call the ecology of stigmas—their relation to the temporal and spatial contexts in which they are produced—and second to give needed historical context to them and the representational tropes that currently dominate media, policy, and academic discussions about prostitution. This article finds significant continuities and discontinuities between media representations during the two study periods. In particular, prostitution stigmas are constituted out of cross-articulations of narratives around containment, culpability, and contagion across the twentieth century, but the ideational contents and empirical referents of these narratives reflect the intersection of sex industry contexts with historically specific concerns around gender, sexuality, race, and social status. Stigmas of the sex industry, rather than being constant, reveal themselves to be both deeply ecological and accommodating to a range of concerns about female sexuality and normative behavior that are sensitive to historical time.

Research on the intimate partnerships of female sex workers (FSWs) tends to focus on the risks associated with these relationships. This paper takes as its starting point that the situation of FSWs is better understood by including knowledge of the benefits of their intimate partnerships. Specifically, we employ the conceptual framework provided by emergent research examining intimacy as a complex fusion of affective and instrumental dimensions among sex workers. This perspective allows us to frame information about FSWs’ intimate partnerships within a behaviour-structural approach that is helpful for identifying how intimate partnerships can be a source of both benefit as well as increased risk to FSWs.