28th Southern Writers/Southern Writing Graduate Student Conference

University of Mississippi

July 26th-27th, 2025

Call for Submissions

Intersecting Ecologies: Environmental Studies in the U.S. and Global South



The Southern Writers/Southern Writing Conference (SW/SW) is an interdisciplinary conference, welcoming graduate students, creative writers, activists, and community members with interest in the U.S. or Global South from all departments and fields of study. The 28th edition of SW/SW will be held at the University of Mississippi from July 26th-27th, 2025.



“When it dawned on me that the garden I was making (am still making and will always be making) resembled a map of the Caribbean and the sea that surrounds it, I did not tell this to the gardeners who had asked me to explain the thing I was doing, or to explain what I was trying to do; I only marveled at the way the garden is for me an exercise in memory, a way of remembering my own immediate past, a way of getting to a past that is my own (the Caribbean Sea) and the past as it is indirectly related to me (the conquest of Mexico and its surroundings).”

- My Garden (Book) (1999), Jamaica Kincaid



In My Garden (Book), Jamaica Kincaid traces the legacy of plant colonialism in a range of locales: Cambridge, MA; Antigua; China; and others. She contemplates the intimate space of her garden as a global labor, one that is at times resistant to and complicit with the violence of colonialism on the landscape—both human and plant. As she explains, a garden is never just a garden; it is “bound up with words about the garden,” a meditation on the ways that beliefs about ecologies are entangled with the history of settler colonialism, the Middle Passage, and other place-based forms of colonialism. The pleasure of looking at or growing plants can never be entirely separated from this violence.



Just like Kincaid’s book, we believe that no one environment is isolated from another, and that the legacies of colonialism continue to affect our relationships with our worlds, whether they be urban, rural, or pastoral. As southern studies has pointed to, the souths that many call home are interconnected by history, ecology, among other factors. The SW/SW Conference committee seeks papers that bring global souths together to discuss the immediate, local, national, planetary, & etc. ecologies that are continually wrapped up in the politics of words, beliefs, places, peoples, and other worldly beings, sometimes in line with or at odds with a legacy of colonial violence.



The 28th SW/SW Conference calls for scholarship, art, and activism that asks, answers, or troubles the question: How can thinking ecologically help us think globally? Can ecological thinking unborder, unbind, or unbound our relationships or beliefs with/about the people, beings, and histories connected to “southern” places and spaces?



We encourage submissions of writing and scholarship from all types of backgrounds and lived experiences, including those who have been historically barred from participation by a southern studies characterized by exclusionary politics.



Topic examples could include (but are absolutely not limited to):

Literature and other media that depict the nonhuman (the plant, the fungus, the animal, the mineral, the microbe, and beyond).

Interdisciplinary readings of literature and other media that engage with scientific, environmental humanities, posthumanism, or new materialism.

Discourses and beliefs surrounding ecology; iterations of the Anthropocene (Plantationocene, Capitalocene, Cthulucene, etc.); climate denialism.

Scientific writing; nature writing; ecopoetry; travel narratives; journals; diaries; documentary; podcasts; other forms of testimony or observation about environmental spaces and places.

Engagement with ecocriticism, environmental humanities, or other sciences, including but not limited to biology, ecology, chemistry, environmental histories, and geology.

Transhistorical and transcontinental readings of colonialism and environment, including but not limited to settler colonialism, chattel slavery, extraction, plant colonialism, and other processes that put humans and places into violent contact.

Ecocide; toxification; displacement; pesticide runoff; slow violence; ecological injustice of many forms.

Natural and human-induced disasters; weather conditions; climate change; geological transformations.

Wilderness; conservation; preservation; national parks; ecology rebuilding efforts.

Anthropological and sociological studies of southern ecologies.

Materiality (dirt, compost, minerals, water, elements, etc.)

Relationships between living beings (humans and beyond); alternative ecological relationships (past or present); folk and holistic medicine; ecological spiritual practices.

The role of technology in the ecological; digital ecologies; bioengineering; synthetic environments; artificial intelligence and its impact on the environment; technological environments (social media, virtual reality, etc.)



Instructions for submission:

For all submissions (research, creative, or activist), please submit a 250-word abstract that explains how the proposal engages with southern expression or culture and one (or more) of the topics listed above. Please also include a 100-word biography for each presenter. Additionally, for creative submissions, please also submit ONE of the following: 1) a 5-page (or less) excerpt of a written creative work; 2) a 10 minute or less excerpt of film or video; 3) a zip folder with images of an artistic or other visual medium.



To apply, complete the online submission form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd67kVeiZiAMtedLejKs7ESn9FsjIQgHMm1GCSs55CWwOdBFQ/viewform).

We will actively update the conference website (https://swswgradconference.com) as we approach the dates of the conference.

The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2025. Accepted presentations will be notified no later than the end of March.

Please direct all questions to the conference chairs (swswgradconference@gmail.com).