Starting today, the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies will host a conference titled “Space and Place.” The events will last through Friday, ending with an address from keynote speaker David Simon at 1 p.m. at the Oxford Courthouse.
According to Interim Director Jaime Harker and Assistant Director Theresa Starkey, the conference has decided to focus on gender and popular culture as a way to re-engage the student body with the work the Isom Center does and to reintroduce themselves to the larger community.
“One of our goals is to show the value of interdisciplinary studies, the humanities and gender studies – what can be produced and the types of conversations that can take place,” Harker said. “We want to celebrate and showcase what our university students are doing in terms of research, and our conference gives them that platform.”
David Simon will be delivering the keynote address. He is a Baltimore-based journalist, author and television producer. He is creator of the critically acclaimed HBO series “The Wire” and was involved in the making of the NBC drama “Homicide,” HBO’s “The Corner” and “Generation.” His most recent project, “Treme,” is a drama about post-Katrina New Orleans.
Starkey reached out to Simon in the summer of 2014 to invite him to this year’s conference. She told him the center “wished to challenge students creatively, intellectually and academically when it comes to thinking about complex issues, such as space and place, in our everyday lives and to encourage them to consider how race, gender (and) class function as intersections in community life.”
The Isom Center believes that David Simon will be an asset to this conference because of the aspects of his television shows.
“‘The Wire’ insisted on the flawed yet glorious humanity of all its urban dwellers: drug dealers, crackheads, corrupt cops, sleazy politicians and snitches,” Harker said. “Though much of its terminology continues to inform my own speech —‘juking the stats,’ for example, remains a depressingly relevant concept no matter what one’s station of life — it is ‘The Wire’s’ embrace of people usually dismissed in pejoratives that still resonates.”
Simon’s work seems to resonate on this campus and with this conference’s theme.
“Mr. Simon’s geographically and socially informed body of work as TV writer, producer and investigative journalist fit so well (within) our conference theme,” Starkey said. “We are honored to have him as speaker for the Sarah Isom Center and to partner once again with the Conference for the Book.”
All panels are free and open to the public and will be held in the Oxford-University Depot off Ford Boulevard.
The schedule of events can be found at the Isom Center’s website. The schedule includes presentations and panels by university professors, roughly 33 Ole Miss students and several by students from other universities inside and outside the state of Mississippi.
Natalie Williams
nlwilli3@go.olemiss.edu
