This conversation addresses Professor Trapedo Sims’ current work directing an Inside-Out education program in a men’s medium-maximum security prison in rural Illinois. Here, Prof. Trapedo Sims facilitates transformative peace-building circles that interrogate gender/queer identities, toxic masculinity, and artistic testimony by proffering expressivity from both inside and outside students in the spirit of collaborative authorship.

Prof. Leanne Trapedo Sims was born in Johannesburg, South Africa: Apartheid was the early ferment for her political and social commitments. She is the Daniel J. Logan Associate Professor of Peace and Justice and Chair at Knox College. From 2012-2016, Leanne Trapedo Sims conducted trans-disciplinary research as a feminist ethnographer at the sole women’s prison in Hawai‘i—Women’s Correctional Community Center.

Her book—Reckoning with Restorative Justice: Hawai‘i Women’s Prison Writing—was published with Duke University Press, 2023. Her work interrogates the intersections of gender, Indigeneity, violence and state power in colonized Hawai‘i.

Trapedo Sims is active in prison activism/education and coalition building. At Knox College, she is shaping a new, interdisciplinary program in Peace and Justice with a focus on critical carceral studies and abolition. She is director of the Prison Education program with the nearby Henry Hill Correctional Center and is building an Inside-Out-style Prison Exchange program with Hill. She has dreams to establish a Restorative Justice Laboratory at Knox College. She envisions the Lab as an incubator for local activists, artists, advocates, impacted families, and the inside community to address reparative justice and mass incarceration in the Galesburg and Chicago areas.

Her work has appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Autumn 2020, and in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 2018 special issue, “Mapping Gendered Violence: Contemplating Conflict and Crisis in Contemporary Societal Struggles.”