Arresting hope: Women taking action in prison health inside out

摘要

In 2014, we published the book Arresting Hope: Women Taking Action in Prison Health Inside Out , which narrates a story about women in a provincial prison in Canada, about how creative leadership fostered opportunities for transformation and hope, and about how engaging in research and writing contributed to healing. Arresting Hope reminds us that prisons are not only places of punishment, marginalization, and trauma. They can also be places of hope, where people with difficult lived experiences can begin to compose stories full of healing, anticipation, communication, education, connection, and community. Since the publication of Arresting Hope , we have been engaged with further research, and we are now editing a second book tentatively titled Releasing Hope . We have been reflecting on our personal and professional commitments to research with women with incarceration experience, as well as the many ways that this research journey together as a collaborative team of four editors working with many others has informed and influenced our ways of being in the world. In this article, we offer four reflections on our collaboration as we continue to bring our academic and activist commitments together in order to promote education, awareness, and change. In our collaboration, we have discovered the value of researching, conceptualizing, and writing in creative ways in order to understand how the stories of individuals are always connected to social and institutional dynamics of policy and practice.