With the autumn semester well underway and the return of cooler weather now fully upon us here at Ohio State, OPEEP is looking back on some key highlights and successes for project staff, students, and instructors in recent months. The past year has been productive and exciting for OPEEP as we have expanded our staff, increased our course offerings, and established new partnerships across campus and around the state. We are excited to share some of our recent accomplishments as well as what is on the horizon for the near future.
In the 2022-23 academic year, OPEEP faculty taught a total of eleven courses at four prison facilities, reaching new students on four OSU campuses! This year, we are offering classes at two new prisons – Allen Oakwood Correctional Institution (AOCI) in Lima and London Correctional Institution (LoCI) – while we continue to offer classes at the Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW) in Marysville, Southeastern Correctional Institute (SCI) in Lancaster, and Richland Correctional Institution (RiCI) in Mansfield. Find more information about our spring 2024 course offerings here on our website.
In January, OPEEP received a $480,000 Mellon Grant to support our Liberation at the Margins (LAM) Collective at ORW. LAM Collective is comprised of incarcerated students and campus faculty, staff, and students and will be the academic and intellectual foundation of OPEEP’s programing at ORW. LAM Collective will design and implement innovative workshops on prison-based and justice-oriented teaching and learning, produce original scholarship on Black feminist pedagogies and principles, and work as an advisory council informing our research on race relations at women’s prisons and the establishment of an embedded degree program at ORW. Our intellectual journey with this amazing group of women has already been off to an incredible start, with OPEEP staff and four incarcerated LAM members presenting together on a recent panel at the National Women's Studies Association conference on October 27 in Baltimore, MD (more about this in our next newsletter!).
This past May, we also offered our first OPEEP Instructor Training to prepare OSU faculty to teach prison-based classes. The fourteen new additions to the ranks of OPEEP instructors – Sierra Austin-King, Amy Close, Brittany Collier-Gibson, Molly Farrell, Linda Mizejewski, Alvaro Montenegro, Dai Newman, Adrienne Oehlers, George Rush, Lisa Shabel, Monica Stigler, Lyn Tjon Soei Len, Virginia Tompkins, and Elizabeth Weiss – hail from the Columbus, Lima, Mansfield, and Newark campuses, representing ten disciplines and three colleges. SCI hosted one day of training, with incarcerated OPEEP students serving as co-facilitators of pedagogical workshops. It was a unique opportunity for faculty to experience first-hand the transformative spaces that OPEEP is creating within prison facilities. (See the article in this newsletter on the 2023 Instructor Training.) We look forward to adding several new classes to our roster in the upcoming semesters. Be on the lookout for more information soon about our May 2024 instructor training, and drop us a note if you’re interested in participating! The three-day training will be May 6-8 and is open to OSU faculty and instructional staff at no charge.
Congratulations to Siatta Dennis-Brown on her transition from a part-time office associate to a full-time Program Coordinator in a cost-shared position with OPEEP and GAHDT! In this new role she will support our collaborative work with GAHDT while continuing to assist with OPEEP’s educational and outreach activities. Additional congratulations to our other Program Coordinators, Nicole Edgerton and Babette Cieskowski, who celebrated their one year anniversaries with OPEEP! We are deeply grateful for all of the OPEEP staff’s hard work and dedication. Their creativity and tireless commitment to OPEEP’s mission have been instrumental to our success in expanding our programming and increasing OPEEP’s visibility on campus and in the community. We are happy to announce two other new staff members, Dominique Gedanke Flacksberg, who joined the OPEEP staff as a GRA with funds from our Mellon Grant and a Student Academic Success Research (SARS) Grant. Dominque is a Design graduate student and will assist OPEEP in producing digital media and informatics for dissemination to public and campus audiences. We also have Hannah Moore onboard, as a GRA with funds from our Mellon Grant. Hannah will assist with LAM Collective activities.
We bid farewell to Advisory Council members Amber Michael, Nicole Nieto, Ramon Reid, Winston Thompson, and Shannon Winnubst, whose ideas and support have nurtured OPEEP’s development. These inaugural council members will always be part of the OPEEP family, and we look forward to collaborating with them in new ways. With their departure, we welcome new council members, Isabella Guinigundo, Dai Newman, Miriam Saab, Leslie Rombkowski, and Carmen Winant. Be sure to check out their profiles here on our website.
As a social justice educational project that is grounded in Black feminist abolition movements, our campus initiatives strive to impact campus cultures and to welcome those impacted by the justice system to our communities. As we've begun this semester and look toward the coming months, our priorities remain preparing to launch our embedded degree program at ORW and expanding our campus programming and outreach, especially by welcoming those directly impacted by mass incarceration to share their stories. This year we are partnering with the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme (GAHDT) to collaborate on their theme, Abolition and Freedom Dreams. In early October, the Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows hosted Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley for his Keynote Address titled "Freedom Dreams and US Democracy," and on the following day, he was able to visit ORW with OPEEP staff to speak with members of the LAM Collective, who had read and discussed Kelley's Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002/2022) in the weeks leading up to his visit. Kelley's Keynote and visit to ORW was deeply empowering and intellectually stimulating for everyone involved, and he has the LAM Collective's deepest gratitude for his continued dedication to showing up for the communities most impacted by his work and teachings as an academic and an activist. OPEEP will continue collaborating with GAHDT to bring more events like Dr. Kelley's visit in October and our panel on Reentry and Higher Education in November to our campus and greater communities. Stay tuned for more events and programming as the year goes on!
We hope that you’ll take time to browse our website to learn more about our classes and campus activities and that you’ll join us in this work. Follow us on Instagram @OPEEP_OSU and reach out to us at opeep@osu.edu if you’d like to join our listserv.
Drs. Tiyi Morris & Mary Thomas
