Vaughan Jones showed how to associate links in the -sphere to elements of Thompson’s group and proved that gives rise to all link types. This talk will introduce Jones’s construction and discuss two recent extensions– the first is a method of building annular links from Thompson’s group , which contains as a subgroup, and the second is a method of building -tangles, which give rise to an action of on Khovanov’s chain complexes. This talk includes joint work with Slava Kruskhal and Yangxiao Luo.