Biographical work and the production of credibility in sex work interviews

Iulia Gheorghiu and Julie Ham

The British Journal of Criminology, 2023, vol. 63, issue 1, 151-167

Abstract: This article explores the concept of biographical work as a sustained pursuit during interviews with persons engaging in stigmatized and criminalized work. Based on interviews with women engaging in sex work and intimate economies in Hong Kong, the article examines the research interview as an interactional and institutional encounter where interviewer and interviewee jointly create meaning and articulate experiences to produce credibility. Relying on the sex workers’ rights framework and its adjacent debates, the article argues that social theory and critique construct reality by shaping public discourse and moral sensitivities in institutional encounters and act as moral resources that inform positionalities. The article argues for the importance of attending to both interactional and institutional demands made by interview encounters in data interpretation.

Keywords: biographical work; credibility; interaction and institutional order; sex work; sex worker rights framework (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/bjc/azac003 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:crimin:v:63:y:2023:i:1:p:151-167.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The British Journal of Criminology is currently edited by Eamonn Carrabine

More articles in The British Journal of Criminology from Centre for Crime and Justice Studies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().