School of Politics and International Studies

Call for papers: The Wire as social science fiction?

26 November 2009 - 27 November 2009 | Call for papers: The Wire as social science fiction? | Conference

Leeds Town Hall

The Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, University of Manchester and the Open University; the Department of Sociology, the Department of Theatre, Film and Television, and the Taylor & Francis Journal Information, Communication & Society , University of York & the Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law, University of Leeds are pleased to announce a jointly organised conference: 'The Wire as Social Science Fiction?'

Plenary Speaker: Prof. Peter Moskos (CUNY), author of Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District (Princeton University Press, 2008).

The HBO TV series The Wire has been critically acclaimed not just as a complex piece of 'entertainment' but also as a profoundly 'sociological' piece of TV, invoking a renewed sense of the 'sociological imagination' amongst many. 

We are seeking papers that utilise The Wire either as a topic or as a resource for the social sciences and the humanities. We welcome papers from any disciplinary context and on any subject. We hope to generate a programme that will appeal to those with an interest in, inter alia: area regeneration; celebrity; criminology; drugs; class analysis; education; gender and sexualities; film and TV studies; globalisation; journalism; language and interaction; media studies; organisational studies; policing; policy studies; politics; 'race' and ethnicities; social and political philosophy; simulation and simulacra; surveillance studies; urban studies; and violence. We are also interested in papers that examine the role of literature, fiction and other cultural phenomena more generally that are generative of a contemporary sociological imagination.

The conference fee is likely to be in the order of £125 (Full) or £60 (concessions) for the two days inclusive of lunch.

Deadline for 250 word abstracts for individual papers (30 minutes long): 31 July 2009.

See the CRESC website for further information and the abstract form http://www.cresc.ac.uk/events/Wireconference.html