Tag: youngstown state university

WCSA Conference Postponed until 2021

WCSA members and friends,

All of us in WCSA hope that you are healthy, and doing as well as possible, given the state of our world.

We had hoped to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University by gathering together in that place, which has such significance for our organization, for our conference this year. However, we have decided to postpone until next year–we will not meet in person this year. Please look for further details, but we are planning now to celebrate the 26th anniversary of the Center in Youngstown, likely during May 2021.

Our activism, research, teaching, and our acts of solidarity in the world are always important, yet they seem especially keen now. How we walk through global crises concerns us a great deal. As an organization, we will continue to be a space–both literal and virtual–for thinking together about what we are facing collectively. As an organization focused on working-class issues, in all their intersectional ways, let us remember, think about, talk about, and teach about the ways that this crisis is also about class inequality. As scholars, and for our students and community allies, we face an unprecedented disruption of our lives. What would it mean to center working-class solidarity as we dedicate ourselves to a deeper mission for our work? What kinds of mutual aid are best suited to help us through a pandemic? How can we build institutions and systems that value solidarity and health over profit? How can we build a better world in the wake of this pandemic?

As we walk this path, we hope to glimpse in our activism, research, and teaching what a better world may be. Please visit us here on the WCSA website to see updates about what our members are doing, and to join or renew your membership. Please also check out the Journal of Working-Class Studies, and look for our next issue this June.

We hope you are safe and healthy. We will also look forward to seeing you in Youngstown in 2021.

Solidarity,

Scott Henkel, President
Cherie Rankin, Past President
Allison Hurst, President-Elect
Working-Class Studies Association

WCSA Conference Update and YSAF and Travel Grant Extensions

As is the case with many academic organizations, WCSA is monitoring the COVID-19 situation.

This year’s conference committee is continuing to organize the conference and acceptances will be going out shortly. For those whose conference proposals have been accepted, you need not register for the conference at this time, but please be assured of your acceptance and placement into a session. We are discussing both the possibility of rescheduling of the conference to a later date or converting the conference to a virtual experience if need be. In the coming weeks, we will make a decision about which of these options appears best, in the case our May conference must be adjusted. We will provide updated information at https://workingclassassn.org/wcsa-conference/ when available.

In the meantime, the application deadline for both the YSAF and Travel Grants has been extended to April 1.

Application forms with updated deadlines are available here:

2020 YSAF Application

2020 Travel Grant Application

2020 con logo

Reminder: Proposals for WCSA 2020 Conference Due THIS WEEK – Feb. 20!

Proposals for the Working-Class Studies Association’s 2020 conference, on RE-PLACING CLASS: COMMUNITY, POLITICS, WORK, AND LABOR IN A CHANGING WORLD, are due Feb. 20, 2020.

The conference will be held May 20-23, 2020 at Youngstown State University, in Youngstown, Ohio, and more information is available at the conference website, here.

2020 con logo

Reminder: Proposals for WCSA 2020 Conference Due Feb. 20!

Proposals for the Working-Class Studies Association’s 2020 conference, on RE-PLACING CLASS: COMMUNITY, POLITICS, WORK, AND LABOR IN A CHANGING WORLD, are due Feb. 20, 2020.

The conference will be held May 20-23, 2020 at Youngstown State University, in Youngstown, Ohio, and more information is available at the conference website, here.

2020 con logo

Reminder: Proposals for WCSA 2020 Conference Due Feb. 20!

Proposals for the Working-Class Studies Association’s 2020 conference, on RE-PLACING CLASS: COMMUNITY, POLITICS, WORK, AND LABOR IN A CHANGING WORLD, are due Feb. 20, 2020.

The conference will be held May 20-23, 2020 at Youngstown State University, in Youngstown, Ohio, and more information is available at the conference website, here.

2020 con logo

2020 Conference Plenary Address: Matt Brim

The 2020 WCSA Conference Re-Placing Class: Community, Politics, and Labor in a Changing World, being held at Youngstown State University May 20-23, 2020 is pleased to welcome Matt Brim for a public keynote lecture.

Matt brim

Matt Brim is Associate Professor of Queer Studies at the College of Staten Island, an open admissions college in the City University of New York. His forthcoming book, Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University, reorients the field of queer studies away from prestigious, exclusionary institutions of higher education and toward working-class schools, students, theories, and pedagogies. By exploring underclass queer ideas and laying bare the structural and disciplinary mechanisms of inequality that suppress them, Poor Queer Studies advances a queer-class knowledge project committed to anti-elitist and anti-racist education. Brim’s other publications include the coedited collection Imagining Queer Methods, the black queer studies monograph James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination, and an open access online guide for teaching the HIV/AIDS activist documentary film United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. Brim is a former general editor of WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly and is currently an associate editor for the open access journal James Baldwin Review.

Website for WCSA’s 2020 Conference Up!

The website for the Working-Class Studies Association’s 2020 Conference is now available! Here is the link: https://ysu.edu/wcsa-2020-conference

The 2020 conference theme is RE-PLACING CLASS: COMMUNITY, POLITICS, WORK, AND LABOR IN A CHANGING WORLD. Proposals are due Feb. 20, 2020.

The conference will be held May 20-23, 2020 at Youngstown State University, in Youngstown, Ohio.

On the website, you can see the call for proposals, submit proposals, review information about accommodations, and see announcements about the plenary address.

Reminder: Call for 2019 Annual Working-Class Studies Association Award Submissions

The Working-Class Studies Association (WCSA) invites nominations (including self-nominations) for awards covering the year of 2019.

Award categories are:

  • Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing: Published books of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and other genres
  • C.L.R. James Award for Published Books for Academic or General Audiences
  • Russo & Linkon Award for Published Article or Essay for Academic or General Audiences
  • Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism: Single published articles or series, broadcast media, multimedia, and film
  • Constance Coiner Award for Best Dissertation: Completed dissertations only
  • Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey Award: Book by creator of working-class origins; work that speaks to issues of the working-class academic experience

In all categories, we invite nominations of work that provides insightful and engaging depictions of working-class life, culture, and movements, which addresses issues related to the working class, and which highlights the voices, experiences, and perspectives of working-class people.

To be eligible, works must have been published (in the case of books or articles) or completed (in the case of films and dissertations) between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2019.

To nominate a work for consideration, please ask your publisher to send four hard copies with a cover letter, identifying the category in which the work is being nominated and a brief explanation of why it deserves recognition. It is the author’s responsibility to make sure four copies with a cover letter are submitted.

Nominations are due no later than December 31, 2019.

Submit nominations to:

Cherie Rankin

Heartland Community College

1500 W. Raab Road

Normal, IL  61761

NOTE: Articles and dissertations should be submitted in electronic form to Cherie Rankin at wibblet68@gmail.com

For more information, contact Cherie Rankin, WCSA Past-President, wibblet68@gmail.com

Winners will be announced in spring, 2020. Winners will receive free conference registration and an award acrylic at the WCSA Annual Awards Ceremony. The conference will be held May 20-24 at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, USA. Conference attendance is strongly encouraged. Details of the awards and past winners can be found on the WCSA website here.

Call for Papers for WCSA’s 2020 Conference at Youngstown State University

We are excited to announce the WCSA2020CFP with dates for the 2020 Working-Class Studies Association Conference to be held at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, OH May 20-23, 2020.

Re-Placing Class: Community, Politics, Work, and Labor in a Changing World

Twenty-five years ago, the academic discipline of Working-Class Studies in the US was born in Youngstown, Ohio, as a group of scholars, activists, artists, workers, and practitioners converged around common goals of celebrating the working class in its diversity and complexity, and to advocate for a politics of social justice and equity. This year the Working-Class Studies Association returns to the place the discipline began for the 2020 conference at Youngstown State University, at a time of rising social tribalism, class conflict, and politically calculated populisms. As WCSA re-convenes in a place synonymous with working-class life, we hope to explore the following:

How can Working-Class Studies offer models for understanding the ways in which myriad local and global working classes intersect, cooperate, compete or are co-opted by other interests? What is the place of class as an instrument of either division or unification, both historically and now?  How do global, national, and local politics and policies exploit, ignore, or alternately, empower and enable workers? What potentials exist for solidarity amongst and within migrant, global, regional and local working classes?  How is diversity within the working class essentialized, fragmented, or, alternately, harnessed and maximized for social and political agendas? How can we reposition, or “re-Place” class in our current global politics as a site for effective action?

Further, what is the role of “Place” as geographical, social, psychic, and economic formation? How does “Place” defined by social, political and economic attributes, define community, which is underpinned by identity, ethnicity, status and power relationships? How does “Place” in these broad definitions provoke ways of thinking about the locations, spaces and places of the working class and Working-Class studies today?

We welcome proposals from multiple disciplines and perspectives: pedagogical, theoretical, creative, and professional. Themes and topics for papers, panels and presentations might include—but are not limited to:

  • Populisms, Diasporas, and Nationalisms
  • Intersectionality
  • Race, Capitalism, and Empire
  • Environmental Justice
  • Critical Race Studies
  • Policies and Politics
  • De-Industrialization
  • Global, Regional or Migrant Working Classes
  • Urban/Rural Working-Class life
  • The Cultural Politics of Class
  • Place and/or displacement of working-class communities
  • Labor now—Locally, Regionally and/or Globally
  • Class, Education, and Equity
  • Resilience, Resistance, and “Class Warfare”

The CWCS at Youngstown State welcomes proposals from academics and practitioners across disciplines, community activists and organizers, and public scholars. Proposal abstracts for papers, creative works/exhibitions, and roundtables of no more approximately 350 words are due by Feb.20, 2020.  Please email submissions to wcsaconference2020@gmail.com

 

Call for 2019 Annual Working-Class Studies Association Award Submissions

The Working-Class Studies Association (WCSA) invites nominations (including self-nominations) for awards covering the year of 2019.

Award categories are:

  • Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing: Published books of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and other genres
  • C.L.R. James Award for Published Books for Academic or General Audiences
  • Russo & Linkon Award for Published Article or Essay for Academic or General Audiences
  • Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism: Single published articles or series, broadcast media, multimedia, and film
  • Constance Coiner Award for Best Dissertation: Completed dissertations only
  • Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey Award: Book by creator of working-class origins; work that speaks to issues of the working-class academic experience

In all categories, we invite nominations of work that provides insightful and engaging depictions of working-class life, culture, and movements, which addresses issues related to the working class, and which highlights the voices, experiences, and perspectives of working-class people.

To be eligible, works must have been published (in the case of books or articles) or completed (in the case of films and dissertations) between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2019.

To nominate a work for consideration, please ask your publisher to send four hard copies with a cover letter, identifying the category in which the work is being nominated and a brief explanation of why it deserves recognition. It is the author’s responsibility to make sure four copies with a cover letter are submitted.

Nominations are due no later than December 31, 2019.

Submit nominations to:

Cherie Rankin

Heartland Community College

1500 W. Raab Road

Normal, IL  61761

NOTE: Articles and dissertations should be submitted in electronic form to Cherie Rankin at wibblet68@gmail.com

For more information, contact Cherie Rankin, WCSA Past-President, wibblet68@gmail.com

Winners will be announced in spring, 2020. Winners will receive free conference registration and an award acrylic at the WCSA Annual Awards Ceremony. The conference will be held May 20-24 at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, USA. Conference attendance is strongly encouraged. Details of the awards and past winners can be found on the WCSA website here.