ESO at SAMLA 97: Non-Traditional Souths

 The South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) is hosting its 97th conference this year in Atlanta, GA, from November 6-8, 2025. The timely theme, “Knowledge,” aims to shed light on an array of topics, including propaganda, social justice, censorship, uncertainty, knowledge production, interpretive strategies, textual mobility, intellectual genealogies, critical methodologies, and artificial intelligence. The Emerging Scholars Organization (ESO), an affiliate of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL), will use its panel to interrogate the South through this lens.

What does it mean to engage with the South today? How does knowledge about the South circulate, shift, and transform in an era of digital agency, political urgency, and nontraditional modes of knowing? This panel invites scholars, artists, and activists to consider how southern studies shift disciplinary boundaries, how new technologies and cultural forms challenge yet reinforce southern narratives, and how the South is imagined and engaged from outside its traditional geographies.

We encourage submissions from scholars across disciplines and welcome papers that examine southernness in contemporary and emergent spaces, particularly through unconventional mediums, interdisciplinary approaches, and evolving epistemologies. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Beyond Regional Boundaries: How the South “leaks” into contemporary places, spaces, and discourses beyond the U.S. South or the Global South framework. What does the South look like from the outside in 2025?
• Digital Souths: Video games, interactive fiction, hypertexts, TikTok, and digital literacy as avenues for learning about, imagining, or resisting southern narratives.
• Camp and Parody in Southern Aesthetics: The playful, exaggerated performances of southern culture in contemporary media—such as Chappell Roan’s drag-infused country persona in “The Giver” or Orville Peck’s masked, hyper-stylized take on the cowboy archetype. How do these performances subvert, reinforce, or redefine southern identity?
• Interdisciplinary Methodologies: Ethnographic and fieldwork approaches to the South, public and digital humanities, social sciences in southern studies, environmental knowledge, and scientific discourse in humanities-based research.
• Activism and the Role of the Southern Scholar: The responsibilities of southern artists and academics in Trump-era America. How does contemporary scholarship and art engage with political movements, activism, and public discourse?
• Nontraditional Knowledge and Epistemologies: Southern ways of knowing through storytelling, oral history, root work, spiritualism, and discredited or marginalized knowledge formations. Who has the power to shape knowledge in the South, and how is knowledge racialized, gendered, or classified?
• Speculative Souths: Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurisms, and climate fiction as means of interrogating or reclaiming southern pasts and futures.

Submission Guidelines: Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words along with a brief bio (150 words) to emergingscholarsorg@gmail.com by August 1, 2025.