WGS South, formerly known as the Southeastern Women's Studies Association (SEWSA), is proud to announce 50th Years as the oldest and longest-standing organization for the study of women, gender, and sexuality in North America. A founding member of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA), WGS South has been at the forefront of feminist scholarship, creative activity, advocacy, organizing, and activism in the South since the inaugural conference in 1976.

Justice is a project, a struggle, a horizon that comes into view, moves closer, recedes. WGS South has been, for over five decades, a site of gathering to share knowledge, tools, and skills that move us, as a region, a nation, and a world, closer to that horizon. It has also been a space to take a breath, to gather and call back energy and determination, to be in community with the folks from whom we learn, to plot and argue and devise ways to make each other’s lives more possible, and to make some collective feminist sense of where we’ve been. To remember that as rough as the present moment is – and it is, undeniably and on every register, at every scale – the struggle has persisted and will persist, larger and more enduring than our individual selves. Our role, as feminist scholars and activists, is to shepherd it.

This year, we draw on the reserves of feminist pasts to think through and plot the next 50 years, recognizing the necessity of playing the long game, through setbacks and backlash and all manner of detours and obstacles. Futurity is not a luxury. It is, as Lorde said of poetry, “a vital necessity of our existence.” Future feminist visions of the possible world predicate and calibrate our labor and our dreaming. They are as essential as bread, and they need space to rise. This year, like so many others, WGS South will be that space.

Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to:

  • Abolitionist and decolonial feminisms

  • Southern histories/genealogies of social justice

  • US South/Global South resistance movements

  • Immigration and migration movements

  • Race, gender, sexuality, and the afterlives of plantation economies

  • Climate Justice

  • Disability Justice

  • trans and queer studies, activism, theory, and history

  • Reproductive justice 

  • Theories and practices of coalition, collaboration, and accompliceship

  • Artistic or visual presentations of resistance and roots

  • Practices and possibilities of intergenerational exchange

  • Fieldwork feminisms

  • Strategies for advocacy 

  • Resistance archives

  • Community organizing 

  • Age Studies

  • Memory Studies

  • Mutual Aid In community organizing

We welcome individual paper proposals, panel proposals, workshops, performances, and other creative formats that engage with the conference theme. Submissions from scholars at all career stages, activists, community organizers, and artists are encouraged.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a brief bio (100 words), through the conference submission link by December 1st, 2025. Panel proposals should include a 500-word abstract describing the panel's theme and objectives, as well as individual abstracts and bios for each panelist. The submissions portal will include the option to be considered for one of our Caucus-sponsored sessions. Caucus CFPs to be released October 20, 2025.

  • “Dreaming Beyond Survival: Radical Imagination and Futures of Liberation for Southern BIPOC Persons and Communities.”

    WGS South 2026 BIPOC Caucus
    Call for Papers
    Deadline: December 1st, 2025

    In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D. G. Kelley asks what revolutionaries dream of. His inquiry extends beyond what sparks revolutions to the visions that sustain them—the imagined lives after struggle and the seeds that nurture revolutionary spirit.

    For the 2026 WGS South Conference, the BIPOC Caucus invites submissions that explore vision, imagination, and futurity for BIPOC persons and communities. While previous calls have centered on how BIPOC communities draw from the past to shape the present, this year we turn toward the future—daring to imagine worlds where Southern BIPOC people not only survive, but thrive.

    In an era when conversations about race, difference, and justice are increasingly constrained, the act of imagining itself becomes radical. With the stressors from the current political climate, BIPOC persons are more likely to engage in safety rather than dreaming. Too often, survival leaves little room for dreaming. This year’s BIPOC caucus seek to reclaim that space—to dream collectively, to vision boldly, and to articulate futures grounded in liberation, care, and possibility.

    We invite scholars, artists, activists, and community members to consider:

    • What does the future look like for BIPOC communities in the South and beyond?

    • How can we create worlds where BIPOC people are treated as fully human?

    • What does it mean to move from resistance to creation, from critique to vision?

    In response to Kelley’s enduring question—“We know what they are fighting against, but what are we fighting for?”—the BIPOC Caucus calls for works that do more than describe the problem. We seek contributions that imagine new futures, grounded in radical love, freedom, and collective transformation.

    Topics may include, but not limited to:

    • Imagination as a political act for Southern BIPOC communities.

    • The role of dreaming, vision, and imagination in BIPOC liberation movements.

    • Southern futurisms and reimagining Southern geographies for BIPOC communities.

    • LGBTQIA+, Queer and trans futures in the Black and Brown South.

    • Climate justice, land, and sustainability for BIPOC futures.

    • Dreaming as care work and community building.

    • Pedagogies of imagination and critical hope.

    • Creating liberatory classrooms and campuses.

    • Artistic, digital, and community-based practices of imagining.

    • Decolonizing futurisms: imagining beyond empire and extraction.

    • Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous visions of the South.

    • Feminist, queer, and disability justice approaches to radical futures.

    • Dreaming policy: abolitionist, reproductive, and environmental justice futures.

    The WGS South BIPOC Caucus invites papers that address these or other related questions. Please submit paper proposals using the button below. 

    Please submit any questions to WGS South BIPOC Caucus Chair Jayme Canty at jcanty@cau.edu

  • "The future is disabled"

    WGS South 2025 - Disability Caucus
    Call for Proposals
    Deadline: December 1st, 2025

    “The future is disabled,” poet and disability justice activist Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha argues in their 2022 book, aptly named The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs. In the book they ponder what disability justice looks like “at the end of the world.” Since the publishing of Piepzna-Samarasinha’s book three years ago, apocalypse and collapse feel more real than ever here in the United States. Feelings of hopelessness and grief seem to have only gotten more intense amidst the daily barrage of attacks on disabled lives that we witness offline and online through our screens. But we still trudge on, collectively, dreaming and actively creating different futures for ourselves and for those we love (human and non-human alike). For the upcoming 2026 conference, we invite scholarship that engages with these bad feelings and that takes up Piepzna-Samarasinha’s proclamation, observation, and crip axiom, “the future is disabled.”

    We also broadly invite scholarship on the following timely topics: 

    • Pasts, presents, and futures of disability justice in the South 

    • Disability, the internet, and economies of mis/disinformation

    • Crip technoscience 

    • Debility 

    • Madness

    • Care work and disability intimacies

    • Disability and crip futurity 

    • Healthism and/or wellness culture

    • Legacies of eugenics 

    • Disability maker cultures

    •Disability and environmental/climate justice

    Please submit any questions to Disability Caucus Chair, Anastasia Todd (anastasia.todd@uky.edu). 

  • “Trans, Intersex, and Queer Freedom Dreams and Futurities”

    WGS South 2026 - LGBTQ Caucus
    Call for Papers
    Deadline: December 1st, 2025

    Trans, intersex, and queer life is under attack by authoritarian and regressive forces in the United States and in many places around the globe, particularly in the Southern US and the global south. In this context, the imaginative work of what historian Robin D. G. Kelly calls “freedom dreaming” takes on a heightened urgency, especially for preserving trans, intersex, and queer arts of living and thriving. As the general WGS South 2026 CFP “Feminist Futurities: 50 More Years of Feminist Scholarship and Activism in the South” asks, How can we make each other’s lives more possible? In that spirit, what organizing strategies, political tactics, knowledges, ethical orientations, and affective infrastructures can help us to cultivate post-scarcity, anticaptivity, and antisubordination forms of trans, intersex, and queer subjectivity, sociality, and becoming? How can we creatively and critically imagine the next 50 years of trans, intersex, and queer scholarship and activism in the South? How can histories of trans, intersex, and queer resistance, solidarity, and social transformation inform possibilities for imagining and articulating trans, intersex, and queer freedom dreams and futurities? 

    This year’s LGBTQ Caucus welcomes creative and critical papers that provide new perspectives on trans, intersex, and queer freedom struggles, dreams, and futurities, as well as the varied social justice movements multiply marginalized communities are building to sustain them. What lessons do trans studies, intersex studies, and queer theory offer for reconceptualizing the political climate and political economy of LGBTIQ life under an increasingly authoritarian state? How are trans, intersex, and queer communities devising strategies for critically analyzing and intervening in racial capitalism, white nationalism, the unequal distribution of life chances and health outcomes under neoliberalism, environmental devastation, war, anti-immigrant fervor, and technologies of misinformation and disinformation? How can trans studies, intersex studies, and queer theory help us to craft: new models of care and communal resistance to curative, administrative, and other forms of violence; new strategies of organizing and opposition; new forms of solidarity, mutual aid, and coalition across our many differences; and new articulations of the knowledges, affects, ethics, and politics that might be generative for making trans, intersex, and queer lives more livable and pleasurable?

    The WGS South LGBTQ Caucus invites papers that address these or related questions.

    Please submit questions to WGS South LGBTQ Caucus Chair David A. Rubin at davidarubin@usf.edu.

  • “Reclaiming Our Future: A Call for Papers from Young Leaders, Writers, and Activists”

    WGS South 2026 Student Caucus
    Call for Proposals
    Deadline: December 1st, 2025

    The poet and civil rights activist Audre Lorde once said, "If you can't change reality, change your perceptions of it." In a society that constantly tries to control who we are and confine us, Lorde's words continue to resonate in our world today. The first step toward transformation is changing perceptions—drawing upon the knowledge from the books we read as young people, such as The Hunger Games, The Giver, and Fahrenheit 451, etc. These are the very books that are being banned and removed from shelves because of the warnings and truths they hold about the power structures that govern our lives.

    As Lorde reminds us, "In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action." Even when our current reality makes change feel impossible, this is precisely when we must call upon student leaders, writers, and activists who want to create meaningful impact for the better—those who believe that power belongs to the people, that dreams should be accessible to all, and that the future belongs to all humankind, not just a privileged few.

    This year, WGS South invites young leaders and activists to envision and articulate the future they want to inherit and shape. We seek proposals that demonstrate how different generational perspectives and visions can transform reality and catalyze political change for collective liberation and justice.

    Topics of Interest (but are not limited to):

    ● Youth activism and social movements

    ● Intersectionality and coalition building across identities

    ● Literature and art as tools for resistance and reimagination

    ● Banned books, censorship, and intellectual freedom

    ● Intergenerational dialogue and knowledge transfer

    ● Community organizing and grassroots leadership

    ● Digital activism and social media as platforms for change

    ● Environmental justice and youth climate movements

    ● Reimagining education and pedagogies of liberation

    If you would like your work and ideas to be featured at the WGS South 2026 Conference, please tag your proposal to be considered for a special Student Caucus Panel. We welcome individual papers, panel proposals, creative presentations, workshops, and multimedia projects.

    For more details, submission guidelines, and additional resources, please visit: https://wgssouth.org/2026conference

    Questions? Please contact the 2026 Student Caucus Chair, Mariam Shafik, at mshafik@students.kennesaw.edu