Feminist Futurities: 50 More Years of Feminist Scholarship and Activism in the South

Thursday, March 19, 2026 - Saturday, March 21, 2026

WGS South, formerly known as the Southeastern Women's Studies Association (SEWSA), is proud to announce 50 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.

Featured Presenters:

Thursday, March 19, 2026 | Opening Keynote Speaker

Dr. Andrea Baldwin, Associate Professor, The University of Utah

Friday, March 20, 2026 | Plenary Speaker

Dr. Menah Pratt, Professor & Vice President for Strategic Affairs, Virginia Tech

Thank you to our event co-sponsors:

LGBTQ+ Center at Wake Forest University, Program in African American Studies at Wake Forest University, Wake Forest University Office of Wellbeing, Wake Forest University School of Divinity, Women’s Center at Wake Forest University