Kimberly Fuentes CarrilloAssistant Professor of Civil Society & Community Studiesshe/her/ella

My interdisciplinary scholarship sits at the intersection of social welfare, criminal justice, and critical geography with a specialization in arts-driven and community-led methods. My research program advances three interrelated strands: (1) innovating participatory research methods, ensuring marginalized communities are trained in qualitative research methods as an intervention to address health inequities; (2) co-producing knowledge with criminalized communities to understand how they survive and resist abandonment, colonialism, and racial capitalism while transforming this knowledge into community-informed interventions and policy solutions; and (3) analyzing how “community safety” discourses are weaponized to justify the regulation and dispossession of system-impacted communities, particularly, Black, Indigenous, and otherwise people of color (BIPOC) in the sex trades (from sex work to sex trafficking and everything in between).

As a public scholar, I actively collaborate with practitioners, policy makers, and grassroots organizers through the co-creation of zines, policy briefs, articles, and most recently a documentary titled The Sex Worker’s Guide to Parenting. My work has garnered support from 15 grants and fellowships in the last five years, totaling over $1.5 million. I have been nationally recognized for my excellence in research by the Ford Foundation as a Predoctoral Fellow, the Society for Social Work Research with their inaugural Community-Research Partnership award, and the California HIV/AIDS Research Program’s award for Excellence in Equity and Inclusion. As a queer Latina, the daughter of Oaxacan immigrants, and the first in my family to pursue higher education, I am passionate about paying it forward, particularly in ways that build a more inclusive and liberatory future for historically marginalized communities.

Selected Publications

Fuentes, K., Levitt, L., Soriano, K., Rowland, A., & Wit, N. (2025). SESTA/FOSTA as de Facto Hate Policy: Combatting Carceral Investments and Uplifting Community-Based Solutions. Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 22, 1705–1716.

Fuentes, K., Coleman, S., Ye, K., Lee, K., & Madness, A. (2024). Sex Working Parents: Surveilled in the Parenting Panopticon. Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 22, 607–618.

Fuentes, K. (2022). Sex Worker Collectives Within the Whorearchy: Intersectional Inquiry with Sex Workers in Los Angeles, CA. Affilia, 38(2), 224–243.

For a full list of publications, see Fuentes Carrillo’s CV.

Featured Media

• Ye, K. (Director). (2026). A Sex Worker’s Guide to Parenting [Motion Picture, Cast].
• Los Angeles Public Press, LA sex workers keep each other safe through community, not charity

See Also

• Policy briefs
  • Baldwin, S. B., Edwards, G., Fuentes, K., Leibowitz, A., Miyashita Ochoa, A., Seegmiller, W., & Shah, M. (2021). Health Outcomes Associated with Criminalization and Regulation of Sex Trade. California HIV/AIDS Policy Research Centers. Southern California HIV/AIDS Policy Research Center, Los Angeles, CA.
  • Miyashita Ochoa, A., Wilson, B. D. M., Fuentes, K., Jones, R., Lee, K., & Macklin, M. (2023). Risk of Criminalization Among Sex Workers Carrying Condoms: Public Health Consequences of Police Harassment. Southern California HIV/AIDS Policy Research Center, Los Angeles, CA.