The Spring 2023 semester is already off with a bang! This semester, OPEEP is facilitating seven courses across two different prison facilities, amounting to the project's greatest number of course offerings in one semester yet. More details about OPEEP Spring course offerings can be read below, including prison locations, course titles, and course descriptions (these details can also be found on the "Courses" page of our website).
The OPEEP team is wishing all of our instructors and students luck for a wonderful Spring semester!
Courses at the Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW) in Marysville
ENG 2268: Introductory Creative Nonfiction Writing with Lima Campus Professor David Adams (adams.428@osu.edu), Mondays 5:00-7:45pm
This creative writing course will function as a writing workshop: our reading and discussion will focus on student work as well as published models of creative nonfiction. We'll consider the literary elements of nonfiction, including voice, point of view, characterization, narrative structure, detail, and figurative language. Each student will build a portfolio of creative nonfiction and we'll discuss the importance of writing communities and audiences. The practice of creative nonfiction allows each writer's own voice to assume authority. Experience, expertise, and experiment—three words with a common origin—will remain central to our work: recognized as the foremost experts on their own experience, students will learn that finding the most effective ways to communicate this expertise, like experience itself, involves experimentation.
SOC 2211S: Corrections: An Inside-Out Course with Columbus Campus Professor Terrance Hinton (hinton.212@osu.edu), Mondays 12:30-3:15pm
This course engages students in critical readings and discussions focused on the origins and development of the American criminal justice system, the historical and contemporary use of punishment and rehabilitation, the re-emergence of restorative justice, and the broader relationship between criminal and social justice. Specifically, we will focus on better understanding mass incarceration, considering its causes and consequences, as well as exploring the impact of crime, imprisonment and related policies on victims and communities. A marriage of theoretical knowledge with practical understanding and experience is achieved by holding class inside the Ohio Reformatory for Women throughout the semester. Involving roughly equal numbers of OSU students and incarcerated students, the class utilizes a variety of active learning techniques and leads to production of one or more class projects by the end of the course.
ENG 2275: Literatures of Addiction with Newark Campus Professor David Ruderman (ruderman.4@osu.edu), Mondays 12:30-3:15pm
This class addresses the issue of addiction from a personal, socio-cultural, and political perspective. Nationwide, nearly 50% of Americans have been directly exposed to alcoholism in their families. The number of drug overdose deaths increases at an annual rate of 4%. In addition, deaths from heroin overdoses have quadrupled over the last six years. To understand addiction at a deeper level, in this class we read novels, poems, and memoirs, look at movies, and listen to songs that deal with addiction. We ask certain core questions: what does it mean to be addicted? What is the relation between creativity and addiction? What role does systemic and intergenerational poverty play? What are the lasting effects of addiction on the community?
WGSS 2822: Introduction to Queer Studies with Columbus Campus Professor Shannon Winnubst (winnubst.1@osu.edu), Mondays 5:00-7:45pm
This course is sponsored by the Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project (OPEEP), is cross-listed in the Departments of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and English, and counts towards the“Race, Ethnicity & Gender” foundational course of the GE as well as the “Cultures & Ideas” and “Social Diversity in the US” of the former GE. The course introduces foundational concepts of the interdisciplinary field of queer studies, focusing especially on the intersections of sexuality and gender expression with race, class, and nationality. Class meetings will take place at the Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW), an adult correctional institution in Marysville, Ohio, and will involve roughly the same number of OSU students (“outsiders”) as incarcerated students at ORW (“insiders”). Course design emphasizes discussion and collaboration in learning. The course also provides a unique experience for all students that I hope will have a transformative effect during the semester and beyond.
Courses at the Southeastern Correctional Institution (SCI) in Lancaster
ENR 2300: Society and Natural Resources with Columbus Campus Professor Alia Dietsch (dietsch.29@osu.edu), Wednesdays 5:30-8:15pm
This course seeks to foster a community of engaged scholars who wish to examine, discuss, and apply learning about how society interacts with the environment and natural resources in complex social-ecological systems. The main organizing features are habitats (land, water), resources (air, wildlife and fisheries, vegetation/trees, soil), and processes (e.g., restoration, protected areas) and the course is organized by 3 social levels (individuals, communities, and polities) repeated across each organizing feature. The goals of this class are to fundamentally explore why humans do what they do (and why they don't do what they 'should') and how people decide (and enforce) what that 'should' is in the context of our planet. We will also focus on issues related to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Discussing these topics requires students, the teaching assistant, and the instructor to recognize and honor that we all come from different backgrounds, and to commit to share our experiences in ways that allow for new understandings through dialogue that may be uncomfortable yet transformative.
PHIL 2194: The Philosophy of Happiness with Columbus Campus Professor Amy Shuster (shuster.67@osu.edu), Tuesdays 5:30-8:15pm
Most people say they aim for happiness in their own lives and wish their friends happy lives too. Unlike other good things, one person’s happiness does not require another person’s unhappiness. But beyond that, what is it? Is it a state of mind, or something more? Can we be mistaken about our happiness? Once we get clear about what happiness is, does that help us answer questions about how it relates to a flourishing and meaningful life, and a good political community? For instance, what should we think about happiness in light of the prevalence of suffering in our world and our capacity for harm and vulnerability? This course will provide a survey of philosophical responses to questions about what happiness is, how we can best pursue it, and whether (and if so, why) we should try to be happy.
GEOG 3600: Space, Power, and Political Geography with Newark Campus Professor Kenneth Madsen (madsen.34@osu.edu), Mondays 5:30-8:15pm
GEOG 3600 is an introduction to political geography, how space is controlled, and the ways in which places reflect and serve as a basis for power. In studying this topic, we will draw on case studies at various scales from the local to the international. Territory and territoriality, for example, are concepts frequently associated with nation-states, but which also have small group and even individual applications. Together we will apply knowledge from our study of political geography to better understand personal space, graffiti, political protest, electoral geography, colonization, borders, inequality, states and statecraft, governance, popular culture, classrooms, prisons, and other issues of student interest. We will talk about the politics of nations, regions and localities – of course – but political geography is about more than just "politics"!