With authoritarianism and nationalism on the rise in the US and abroad in recent years, “resistance” has become a keyword for activists, stressing the importance of organized, conscience-based opposition to governmental oppression. Resistance can take many forms, including traditional and nontraditional public protest, liberation pedagogy, and a variety of artistic expressions. Resistance responds not only to the actions of governments but also to broader power structures (economic, racial, gendered) that support violence and oppression. “(Re)Generation” signals the productive aspect of resistance — resistance as building, energizing, and creating, not simply opposing. “Generation,” of course, also brings to mind the demographics of age and the interactions (sometimes productive, sometimes fraught) among different “generations” of activists and scholars.

For the 2022 SASA conference, we are inviting interdisciplinary papers and roundtables that explore moments (literary, historical, cultural) of resistance and regeneration within national and transnational contexts. And we welcome papers and sessions that explore how scholars’ research, teaching, and/or service perform meaningful cultural work within and beyond their particular academic settings. Further, we ask scholars to consider where and how that public intellectualism/public scholarship fits into the research and teaching agendas of American Studies scholars. 

Possible topics for papers, panels, or roundtable sessions:

• Activist art
• BLM pedagogy
• The #MeToo movement: accomplishments and backlash
• Public scholarship as resistance
• Journalism in the age of alternative facts
• Voter suppression, then and now
• Comparative protest movements
• Resistance on film
• New media and civic regeneration
• Approaches to teaching American Studies in 2022
• Regeneration in the age of COVID-19
• The changing roles of museums and archives

Guidelines for submissions

Please use the online form available here to submit your proposals by August 15, 2021.

For individual papers, you will be prompted to submit an abstract for your proposed paper (500 words) and a brief bio (max 300 words).

For complete panel or roundtable proposals, you will be prompted tosubmit a title and description of the proposed panel or roundtable (300 words); a brief abstract for each presentation within the session (300 words per abstract); and a brief bio for each presenter (250 words per bio).

In the interest of involving as many people in our conference as possible, each conference attendee may be listed in the conference program as a participant in a maximum of two sessions. While we welcome a range of formats, we ask that panels be designed so that they fit within a 75-minute time frame with at least 15 minutes dedicated to discussion. As always, we especially encourage graduate students to attend our conference, to present research, and to enjoy being part of our scholarly community. A limited number of Heusel/Moore travel grants for graduate students will be made available to offset some of the cost of attending the conference. The Critoph Prize recognizes the best graduate student paper presented at each SASA conference. It includes a certificate and a check for $250, as well as recognition at the next biennial gathering. The deadline for graduate students to submit the papers they are presenting at the 2022 conference—as a Microsoft Word or PDF attachment to SASAcritophprize@gmail—is noon on March 3, 2022. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at Conference2021@southeasternasa.org