Call for Submissions

The Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at The University of Mississippi is pleased to announce its 24th Annual Isom Student Gender Conference (ISGC). The ISGC is scheduled for March 20 - 22, 2024, on the campus of The University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. 

As a term, intersectionality was coined in 1989 by a law professor who sought a nuanced way to represent the complex interactions of bias, racism, sexism, and exclusion: rather than deciding whether someone was being discriminated against as a woman OR as a person of color, Kimberle Crenshaw argued that we need more nimble interpretive tools to comprehend the ways that oppression is not either/or but multiple. But the notion that our identities are complex, that we can be, simultaneously, privileged and excluded, goes back much further, to the earliest days of Black liberation, women’s liberation, and gay liberation.  Our lived experience matters; our identities are mediated by larger ideological forces, and the bias that frames a certain identity as the norm and excludes others for not adhering to that norm affects all of us profoundly. To see the many ways these inequalities function, we have to name them, notice them, and confront them.

Grounded in recent Supreme Court cases and legislative agendas, a counternarrative has been circulating in recent years, that the naming is the problem. If we stop noticing, stop counting, stop seeing, then the problem (racism, sexism, homophobia, classism) will simply go away.  If the courts and the law refuse to see color, for example, then no one else will, either. And increasingly, politicians want to censor what universities can teach, what theories are available, what histories can be taught and acknowledged, to make that imaginary ‘truth’ stand in for the complex realities of the intersections of inequality.

The Isom Center has long fostered fearless inquiry into the complexities of culture, history, and ideology; we believe that free speech and relentless curiosity are the foundation of academic inquiry.  Pretending that inequalities don’t exist unless we name them is not a replacement for rigorous scholarly investigation.  Trying to define the terms to exclude whatever makes you uncomfortable may be a debater’s trick, but it is not the way a mature culture, invested in creating liberty and justice for all, approaches the creation of knowledge.

At this year’s Isom Student Gender Conference, we invite participants to submit papers, performances, and presentations that explore inequalities and their intersections.  Students are welcome to submit papers from all disciplines, along with creative writing projects such as fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Additionally, 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. 

A small number of domestic travel grants will be made available to non-UM students. 

Submission deadline is February 3, 2024.