Dr. Laura Agustin, The Naked Anthropologist, is author of the groundbreaking, highly acclaimed Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, which turned her overnight into a lightening rod for international controversy.

Laura writes as a lifelong migrant and identifies with no nationality. Just back in Copenhagen-Malmö from a stint as Visiting Professor in Gender and Migration in Switzerland, she has danced with hustlers in Miami and strippers in San Francisco, learned safe-sex techniques from brothel workers in the Dominican Republic, roomed with an escort and her family in Melbourne and visited bar girls and jailed migrants in Bangkok.

She has recorded oral histories with asylum-seekers on the Mexican border, screamed herself hoarse at the Miss Exotic World pageant, listened to Albanian trafficking victims in an Italian shelter, discussed survival sex with internal migrants in Colombia and argued the pros and cons of being a maid or a prostitute with migrants in Spain.

She helped organise an event in Brussels where sex workers outnumbered their allies, taught English to Jewish refugees from the ex-Soviet Union and did literacy work with undocumented Latin Americans in New York. She has accompanied people handing out condoms on four continents and also worked as secretary, community organiser, dog-walker, research assistant, keypunch operator, supermarket manager, demolition worker, managing editor, packer, database manager and consultant to UNAIDS, the European Commission and the ILO. Her PhD is from the UK’s Open University. She has never been a waitress.

She has learnt ten languages during her lifetime and forgotten most of them, but will do presentations in both English and Spanish and carry on conversations in Swedish and French. She wishes she could remember Arabic.