Learning with Women in Jail

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.

• Chapter One, Red Tent, Research Goals, and Stakeholders.- Chapter Two, Fractured Starts, Conceptual Roadblocks, and Resulting Epiphanies.- Chapter Three, Allowing Ethical Dilemmas to Shape and Teach Us.- Chapter Four, Concluding and Continuing the Work.