Description:
In this workshop, teachers learn about local socioeconomic issues from acclaimed Jacksonville author and FSCJ Communications Professor Tim Gilmore. Aldous Huxley’s complaint that Los Angeles was “nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis” has ofte been misquoted and blown up into Dorothy Parker’s supposedly having called it “72 suburbs in search of a city.” People have leveled the same criticism at Jacksonville. Jacksonville’s incredible diversity has rarely if ever shown its true scale and power, because so little seems to make its vast and often unseemly geography cohere.
As a result, most Jacksonville residents don’t truly realize how diverse the city is. Most residents tend to think of Jacksonville as defined mostly by the part of town where they live. In the mode of Wes Moore’s 2010 book The Other Wes Moore, what would happen if Riverside Avondale spent a day as Moncrief, if Baymeadows reimagined itself as Springfield, if Ponte Vedra and the far rural Westside could empathize with each other?
For at least the last century, Jacksonville has stood out nationally for its violent crime rates. A 1927 Literary Digest article had Jacksonville leading the nation in murders with a “staggering killing record” of 75.9 per 100,000. That’s a higher rate today than that of many so-called “Third World” countries at war. Jacksonville’s murder rates have always correlated to the city’s high rates of poverty, racial tension, and deep educational deficits. Even as late as the 1990s, the last time such numbers were published, Duval County ran a “functional illiteracy” rate close to 50 percent.
So how can we look at the stories of Jacksonville’s specific places in terms of these deep and perennial problems in a way that allows us to work out our problems together, to heal and to grow?
When: 5:00-7PM on Thursday, October 22
Where: Virtual, using Canvas Conferences Big Blue Button
Information about accessing the conference: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PaVCMBU58kBLIySTY0pmrmDD2AWPFG3d02pKCEO3KfQ/edit?usp=sharing
