The Student Caucus of WGS South is dedicated to lifting up the voices of Undergraduate and Graduate students whom are grappling with feminist and women’s studies concerns in their scholarship and on their campuses. The student caucus provides opportunities for inter-institutional networking among students in the region. The caucus is further tasked with bringing the concerns of students to the attention of the WGS South Executive Board.
“Trojan Horses in the Machine: Subversion, Leverage, and
Sowing Dissent from Within”
WGS South 2027 - Student Caucus
Call for Proposals
Deadline: December 1st, 2026
Today’s political and educational landscape is defined by aggressive legislative rollbacks, sweeping bans on diversity initiatives, the defunding of gender and sexuality programs, and the systematic dismantling of tenure and academic freedom. Higher education increasingly mirrors corporate consolidation, where student dissent is policed, career pipelines are sanitized, and institutions operate under tightening surveillance.
As undergraduate and graduate students, we occupy a unique position within this environment. On the one hand, we operate from a place of structural disadvantage. As students set to graduate into an economy plagued by austerity that was not of our making, facing an authoritarian job market where we are incentivized to abandon our feminist commitments in exchange for professional survival, we know that our present and future precarity make direct refusal a high-risk undertaking. And yet, we are positioned within the machinery of the university in such a way that enables us to engage in fugitive strategies that allow us to practice subverting the worlds we are tasked with entering, even if we cannot build entirely new worlds from the outside right now.
The tactic of the Trojan horse is not an endorsement of neoliberal complicity, compromise, or quiet surrender. Instead, it is an intentional strategy of structural infiltration that requires us to recognize our own power. We are not just future employees and employers; we are the impending labor force and technical backbone of industries across the globe, which positions us in spaces – both in academia and the workforce – where we can impart our queer, trans, and feminist knowledges.The challenge before us is learning how to identify the internal cracks, twist existing administrative levers, and use the tools, platforms, and credentials provided by institutional power against the very systems that minted them.
How do we smuggle actionable dissent into hostile and reactionary environments? How can we leverage our feminist skills within and outside of the university to covertly embed liberatory ethics into spaces that resist them? When the world demands ideological compliance, what does it mean to repurpose our position within the university to serve as a vessel for feminist sabotage and underground community building?
This year's Student Caucus welcomes proposals that explore topics including,
but not limited to:
Smuggling queer, trans, and feminist ideas into inhospitable environments
Art & student publications as sites for feminist subversion
Learning to navigate administrative loopholes & institutional resources
to keep the work going even amidst pushbackMalicious compliance and quiet sabotage as campus resistance
Student-led responses to sexual and gender-based violence on campus
Navigating ideological integrity versus career precarity
Infiltrating business, STEM, and non-humanities fields
Underground student-worker organizing and union efforts
Building solidarity networks under campus surveillance
Subverting traditional industry pipelines from within
The limits and risks of inside-out activism
Please submit any questions to Student Caucus Chair,
Samantha Davis (sdavi358@students.kennesaw.edu).
