Conference Updates

Hello WCSA Members!

Be sure to check out the information about travel to the Conference and housing options on our website here: Updates from the Planners and Travel & Housing. June 20th-23rd, 2022 is fast approaching!

Email any questions to the Conference Planners at wcsa2022conference@gmail.com

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://workingclassstudiesassociation.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.