Seeking folks for our CFP below. Please email Dana Ahern (dtahern@usf.edu) and SJ Dillon (sjdillo@emory.edu).

The southern United States is frequently on the frontline of growing legislative attacks on academic freedoms, civil liberties, and immigration throughout the country. Universities, academics, and students as producers of knowledge are attacked as part of policies to control the bodies and minds of all those residing in the US. These attacks are focused on eliminating political possibilities that yet exist in the South and precluding the struggles already underway. Focusing on an analysis of what José Esteban Muñoz would call queer potentiality, this panel examines the U.S. South by offering a critique of the South as a political dead-end. Instead, through attention to the region’s histories, racial politics, and normative and antinormative claims to ‘truth’, the panel explores these states as places not just of resistance, but improvisational thriving. In other words, we discuss the deployment of conservative politics in the South as evidence not of the ease with which the region can be taken over, but rather, as an acknowledgement of the region as a site of resistance. This panel seeks to engage with the idea of "improvisation" by challenging the assumption of political futures and foreclosures as we look to the U.S-South as a place through which to generate alternative imaginaries of collectivity and engage with imaginaries of domination that are spreading across the country.