Community Survey
As we confront the social, political, and environmental failures of the current public health crisis and center the movement for black lives in our scholarship and activism, the SEWSA Board would like to know how SEWSA can further support its constituents through programming, partnerships, resources, and initiatives. We are asking our members, past and present, as well as scholars and activists across the region to complete our survey this fall and to join us in a remote Town Hall meeting before the 2021 conference, which will take place virtually in March.
Over the past two years, the SEWSA Board has been engaged in exciting discussions about the future of SEWSA. This past spring, we had planned to launch a year-long discussion of SEWSA's name, concept, and mission at our 2020 conference at The University of South Florida. The arrival of the novel coronavirus not only derailed those plans, but threw into stark relief the pressing need to discuss the priorities and vision of our community, how we can better support scholars and activists across the region, and SEWSA's role in local and global struggles for social justice.
Since the mid-1970s, SEWSA has sought to address the specific needs of the South through its focus on the Southeastern United States. However, like Minnie Bruce Pratt so eloquently articulated in Oxford, Mississippi at our 2019 meeting, "the South" has never obeyed the limits of state and regional borders. Trajectories of "the South" can be traced throughout the U.S., the Americas, and the world. SEWSA has always attended to the complexity of what counts as the South and questioned the regional parameters of its own concept. For SEWSA, the South is contested territory, and SEWSA has long served "Southerners" beyond the U.S regional border, from the West Coast to South Asia, with a space to think critically about and reimagine a just South. In the coming months, we invite our constituents to think and talk about what "the South" means for our organization and communities and how it should be signified in SEWSA's name and mission.
The term "women" included in SEWSA's title is likewise contested by its members, many of whom have led and continue to lead campaigns to change the names of their institutional programs and organizations to replace or supplement the term "women" with more inclusive and appropriate terminology like gender, sexuality, queer, and feminist and to further qualify the intersections of these terms with race, class, nation, and ability. We also welcome our constituents to think and talk about the fluidity of social identities and how they should be represented in our organizations' name and mission.
SEWSA was founded over 40 years ago as an independent organization serving faculty, scholars, activists, and artists across the Southeast. It is out of the deepest respect for SEWSA's founding mothers, as well as those first scholar-activists who founded the first Women's Studies program 50 years ago this year in San Diego, that we initiate this conversation in solidarity with our founding vision of a socially just world committed to and open to change.
We thank you in advance for taking the time to contribute to this discussion and encourage you to share the survey link with other scholars, students, activists, artists, and partners engaged in the struggle for social justice. As a thank you in the support of Charis Books, the oldest feminist bookstore in the U.S., all completed surveys will be entered for a chance to win one of six $25 gift cards to Charis Books.
