February 14, 2019 – The Texas Center for Working-Class Studies (TCWCS) will hold its fifth annual academic conference on Thursday, Feb. 28 from 8 a.m.-3:45 p.m. in the Collin College Plano Campus Living Legends Conference Center. Conference presentations are free and open to the public.
This year’s keynote speaker is Dr. Jacqueline Jones, chair of the History Department at The University of Texas. A MacArthur Fellow and past finalist for a Pulitzer, Jones published Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical in 2017. The conference will also feature presentations by other noted faculty and guests on issues related to social class, work and the working class.
Dr. Sherry Linkon, the 2016 conference’s keynote speaker, noted that the center’s annual conferences “make class – a topic we don’t talk about nearly enough in higher education or American culture – visible and encourage participants to think about how class intersects with race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and other categories.”
Open to a wide variety of academic disciplines, the conference draws sociologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, photographers and other artists dedicated to understanding the global working-class experience from all scholarly angles. As in previous years, the conference will include undergraduate research in addition to established speakers.
The Living Legends Conference Center is located on the northeast side of Collin College’s Plano Campus, 2800 East Spring Creek Parkway in Plano. For more information on the conference or the Texas Center for Working-Class Studies, contact Dr. Lisa A. Kirby, director, at LKirby@collin.edu.
Collin College serves more than 55,000 credit and continuing education students annually and offers more than 100 degrees and certificates. The only public college based in Collin County, Collin College is a partner to business, government and industry, providing customized training and work force development. In addition, the college operates the Collin Higher Education Center, which serves 3,500 additional students each year in partnership with The University of Texas at Dallas, Texas Woman’s University, Texas A&M Commerce, Texas Tech and the University of North Texas.