In this talk, Rowland will discuss one of the methods she uses in research - semi-structured interviews. She will discuss the theoretical and methodological distinctions required when using interviews as a method of engaging with criminalized and surveilled communities. As a tool for community-based research that seeks to disrupt hegemonic power relations, interviews can be a powerful tool of story-telling that allows over-researched communities to tell their story in their own words. Rowland will discuss this in relation to three field sites in Los Angeles, London and Sydney. Her dissertation, Sex Worker Activism and the Regulatory Liminality of Rights, asks how do sex workers respond, resist, and otherwise navigate state violence? She develops the concept of regulatory liminality to refer to the ambiguity that exists between de jure and de facto regulations, and how that ambiguity constrains and enables criminalized communities resistance strategies. Sex worker's experiences with regulatory liminality encourage their strategies to to center the needs of those most targeted by overpolicing, poverty, stigma, and other forms of socio-political oppression. By attending to transnational relations and strategies by and for sex workers, my project elucidates methods for marginalized communities to create collective governance systems that redress the absence of state welfare; it also attends to both formal and informal means of governing. Rowland finds that sex workers’ modes of care and organizing are alternatives to existing state-led governance models but must also co-exist with those forms of governance and regulation.