Learning with Women in Jail

In this monograph, the ethical implications of engaging in research with vulnerable populations is explored and demonstrates how Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) both enhances the research while addressing these ethical complexities. Although CBPR encompasses different levels of community engagement, in general, the participants, or co-researchers, are involved in the formulation of the research questions and methodologies because they are central to the conversation about what should be researched and how. Participants are directly involved in formulating the study problems and finding solutions, and usually the goal is to create social change that can be applied to and potentially transform the community.Learning with Women in Jail: Creating Community Based Participatory Research  documents the research process to better understand the causes for incarceration and recidivism.The study used a (CBPR) framework so that the people who had directly experienced incarceration would lead the research as much as possible, from framing the research questions and methodologies to data capture and analysis. ​

Jill McCracken is a rhetorician and associate professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. She has a PhD in Rhetoric from the University of Arizona with a dissertation that analyzed street-based sex work representations, the power of everyday language, and how both influence the material conditions of individuals involved in street-based sex work. She has worked with sex workers and victims of trafficking for over fourteen years and with women who have been or are currently incarcerated for the past five years. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative research methods, she increasingly integrates community based participatory research in her work. Her research focuses on the relationships between violence, sexual engagements, choice, and coercion within sex work and trafficking in the sex industry. She is currently developing research with foster-engaged youth that focuses on sexuality education and its impact on participants’ experience with sexual violence, sex work, and/or trafficking in the sex industry.