Dr. Jennifer Suchland is an associate professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is interested in how human rights categories emerge and are contested within relations of geopolitical power, colonial relations, and gendered, sexual, and racial formations. Her work focuses on labor exploitation, forced labor, and human trafficking. Suchland also examines how recognition of harm, such as gender and sex-based violence, can collude with systems of state and colonial violence. https://opeep.osu.edu/people/suchland.15
How and when did you become involved with OPEEP?
Radical social change moves through relations and my relationship with Drs. Mary Thomas and Tiyi Morris led me to OPEEP. I learned from them and through teaching that schools and prisons are institutions that promote and uphold carceral logics. These logics value punishment over care, ignorance over knowledge, and isolation over community.
What course did you teach in Spring 2025, and how was the interaction with your students?
I took prison education training several years ago and am finally teaching Global Human Trafficking: Representations and Realities. I really wanted to teach this class at Ohio Reformatory for Women because women often are criminalized for survival, whether that be engaging in the sex trade, trying to leave a pimp, or for self-defense. Some ORW students shared their knowledge and even experiences with criminalized survival and trafficking. This changed the class dynamic in powerful ways for all the students. Everyone was incredibly engaged. In fact, I had to reduce the readings to create more time for our rich and lively discussions! The students are amazing and I am grateful for the learning community we built together.
What takeaways would you like students to leave your class with?
Students will leave the class with a strong understanding of the stakes of representation. How an issue is represented or how someone’s story is told matters because it impacts who and if someone is seen as a “worthy” victim. Representation has immense power to liberate or to silence and compound exploitation. Importantly, how trafficking is represented also defines what justice looks like. Do we only want to punish traffickers? Or, do we want justly run economies where people are more important than profits and no one is illegal?
What is the one thing you wish more people knew about prison abolition and transformative justice?
I wish people would challenge the assumptions they have about prisons and the people who are incarcerated inside of them. We need to challenge how prisons are represented with the realities of criminalized survival, over-punishment, and the collateral damage of incarceration on individuals, communities, families, and even the environment.
What do you like to do in your free time?
Okay, what free time? I do love all aspects of cooking: reading cookbooks, shopping for food and spices, making the food, and, of course, sharing it with the ones I love.
