16th annual Isom Student Gender Conference - “Undoing the Norms”
The annual Isom Student Gender Conference is held in March. The conference includes presentations by graduate and undergraduate students as well as a featured keynote speaker.
Keynote to be presented by Dr. Brittney Cooper
Call for paper
The Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at The University of Mississippi is pleased to announce its 16th Annual Isom Student Gender Conference in the spring of 2016. The ISGC is scheduled for Wednesday, March 2nd through Friday, March 4th on the campus of The University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. This Call for Papers invites both undergraduate and graduate student scholars, writers, and activists to participate.
The 2016 conference theme is Undoing the Norms. This theme invites participants to question the “norms” of their disciplines of study, society, and of their lives. We hope it creates the potential for a variety of interdisciplinary panels and papers. Papers from all disciplines, along with creative writing projects such as fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are welcome. Proposals for roundtable discussions that center on community building, advocacy, and social change both on and off the campus through the arts, social media, and student engagement with broader communities are encouraged.
We are delighted to welcome Dr. Brittney Cooper, assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University, as the keynote speaker for the conference. She is a Black feminist theorist who specializes in the study of Black women’s intellectual history, Hip Hop generation feminism, and race and gender representation in popular culture. She is also a co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective, a popular feminist blog and writes a regular a weekly column on race and gender politics at Salon.com. You can follow her on Twitter: @ProfessorCrunk.
A small number of travel grants will be made available to non-UM students.
Please submit a three hundred word abstract by January 27th, 2016.
For additional information or questions contact isomctr@olemiss.edu or call (662) 915-5916.
About Dr. Cooper
Currently, Dr. Cooper, assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, is completing her first book project, Race Women: Gender and the Making of a Black Public Intellectual Tradition, 1892-Present. Race Women interrogates the rise of Black female public intellectuals during the watershed moment of 1892-1893. In particular, this work interrogates the manner in which public Black women have theorized racial identity and gender politics, and the methods they used to operationalize those theories for the uplift of Black communities. Along with work on black female public intellectuals, Dr. Cooper studies Black women’s organizations as sites for the production of intellectual thought. She has two forthcoming book chapters on the history of the Order of Eastern Star and the history of Black women’s fraternal and club activism in North Louisiana.
Using Black feminist thought to understand contemporary articulations of Black womanhood is Dr. Cooper’s other major research area. She has published several book chapters and articles on representations of Black women in popular culture, including a piece on the representation of the “baby-mama” figure in Hip Hop music and film, the feminist implications of Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl mishap, and the importance of Michelle Obama in the tradition of Black female leadership. She has a forthcoming article on Sapphire’s Push as a hip hop novel.
Dr. Cooper is co-founder along with Dr. Susana Morris of the Crunk Feminist Collective, a feminist of color scholar-activist group that runs a highly successful blog. Three members of the CFC were recently profiled in Essence Magazine’s list of Young, Black, and Amazing women under age 35 (August 2012 issue). The CFC blog was also named as one of the top 25 Black blogs to watch in 2012 by The Root.com and one of the top “Lady Blogs” by New York Magazine in November 2011. The Collective also does speaking tours, conducts workshops, and engages in a range of activist causes related to women’s issues. Professor Cooper blogs for the CFC as “Crunktastic.”
A native of Ruston, Louisiana, Dr. Cooper considers herself a small-town Southern girl at heart, which explains her affinity for soul food, crunk music, and warm weather.
This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:
http://sarahisomcenter.org/isom-student-gender-conference/