To submit a Session Seeking Papers (SSP), please submit a session here (SSP is an option in the session Type drop-down). We encourage members to submit their SSPs by Wednesday of each week to appear in the following week’s digest. Our weekly digest will continue until October 28th.
For any individual submissions to SSS 2027, please click here.
Race, Resistance, and Resilience: Community Responses to Crime, Inequality, and Injustice in New Orleans & Beyond
Racial and ethnic communities have long developed strategies of resistance, resilience, and collective action in response to crime, violence, policing, structural inequality, and institutional discrimination. From grassroots organizing and social movements to cultural expression, mutual aid, and community-based initiatives, these responses demonstrate how marginalized communities navigate systemic barriers while creating opportunities for social transformation.
Organized by the Southern Sociological Society’s Committee on Racial and Ethnic Minorities (CREM), this session invites interdisciplinary scholarship examining how racial and ethnic communities confront and respond to intersecting forms of inequality and injustice. Particular attention is given to the social, historical, political, and spatial contexts that shape community responses, as well as the ways race, ethnicity, class, gender, and place influence experiences of marginalization, resistance, and collective resilience.
New Orleans provides a particularly meaningful setting for these conversations, given its rich history of racial inequality, community activism, cultural resistance, environmental injustice, and collective organizing. However, the session welcomes research extending beyond New Orleans to other communities across the United States and internationally, encouraging comparative and intersectional perspectives on racialized experiences of crime, inequality, and institutional power.
Potential contributions may explore community responses to policing and criminalization, grassroots movements addressing racial injustice, neighborhood organizing, cultural practices as forms of resistance, mutual aid networks, and collective strategies for confronting systemic exclusion. We especially encourage scholarship that centers community voices, engages historically marginalized populations, and examines the relationship between structural constraints and community agency.
Aligned with the 2027 SSS meeting theme, “Interdisciplinary Sociology: The Bridge to Engagement,” this session emphasizes the importance of connecting sociological research with community experiences, public engagement, and social change. By bringing together perspectives from sociology, criminology, anthropology, history, political science, public health, social work, and related disciplines, the session seeks to advance interdisciplinary dialogue on how communities respond to injustice and build collective pathways toward equity.
The session will appeal broadly to scholars interested in race and ethnicity, crime and deviance, social movements, urban sociology, community studies, inequality, and public sociology. Ultimately, it aims to highlight the transformative potential of community-centered research and collective action in understanding and challenging racialized systems of power.
To be considered, please submit an abstract (250-300 words), name, email, position, and university to Angela Vergara at an850645@ucf.edu no later than October 26, 2026.
**Please note that information provided here is what will appear in the program, so please include your name, affiliation, and contact information exactly as you want it to appear in the program.
Race, Racism, and Racialized Space: Segregation, Inequality, and Belonging
Space is not socially neutral. Neighborhoods, schools, housing markets, public spaces, and digital environments are shaped by historical and contemporary processes of racialization that produce, sustain, and challenge racial inequalities. From residential segregation and displacement to surveillance, environmental injustice, and unequal access to resources, racialized spaces reflect broader structures of power while shaping everyday experiences of mobility, opportunity, belonging, and exclusion.
Organized by the Southern Sociological Society’s Committee on Racial and Ethnic Minorities (CREM), this session invites interdisciplinary scholarship examining the relationship between race, racism, and the social production of space. Drawing on perspectives from sociology, geography, anthropology, urban studies, history, public health, political science, and related disciplines, the session explores how racial hierarchies are embedded in physical, institutional, and digital environments and how communities negotiate, resist, and transform these inequalities.
The session welcomes theoretical, empirical, and community-engaged research addressing residential segregation, housing discrimination, gentrification, displacement, educational inequalities, environmental racism, policing and surveillance, transportation inequities, and unequal access to public infrastructure and community resources. Contributions examining digital spaces, including algorithmic discrimination, online racialized interactions, and emerging forms of digital exclusion, are also encouraged.
Particular attention is given to the intersection of race and ethnicity with social class, gender, immigration status, and other dimensions of inequality, as well as the historical and institutional processes that shape spatial experiences. New Orleans offers a meaningful context for these discussions, given its histories of racial segregation, displacement, environmental vulnerability, cultural resistance, and community organizing. However, the session encourages research across diverse geographic contexts, including urban, suburban, rural, and transnational spaces.
Beyond documenting spatial inequalities, the session seeks to examine how racial and ethnic communities challenge exclusionary practices, reclaim public spaces, build collective identities, and advance more equitable and inclusive environments. Research incorporating spatial analysis, GIS, participatory mapping, qualitative inquiry, historical analysis, and community-based participatory approaches is especially welcome.
Aligned with the 2027 SSS meeting theme, “Interdisciplinary Sociology: The Bridge to Engagement,” this session highlights the value of connecting sociological inquiry with spatial perspectives, interdisciplinary collaboration, and community engagement. By examining how racialized spaces are constructed, experienced, contested, and transformed, the session aims to foster dialogue across disciplines and advance scholarship that contributes to understanding and addressing racial inequalities.
The session will appeal broadly to scholars interested in race and ethnicity, urban sociology, spatial inequality, education, housing, environmental justice, digital sociology, social movements, and public sociology.
To be considered, please submit an abstract (250-300 words), name, email, position, and university to Angela Vergara at an850645@ucf.edu no later than October 26, 2026.
**Please note that information provided here is what will appear in the program, so please include your name, affiliation, and contact information exactly as you want it to appear in the program.
Culture, Memory, and Resistance: Preserving Histories, Challenging Inequality, and Building Community
Cultural practices play a central role in how racial and ethnic communities preserve collective memories, negotiate identities, and respond to historical and contemporary forms of inequality. Through music, food, storytelling, festivals, oral histories, and other forms of cultural expression, communities transmit knowledge across generations, maintain connections to their histories, and challenge dominant narratives that have marginalized or erased their experiences. These practices extend beyond cultural preservation, serving as mechanisms of resistance, solidarity, belonging, and collective action.
This proposed session explores the intersections of culture, collective memory, racial and ethnic identities, and resistance, with particular attention to how communities mobilize cultural traditions to navigate structural inequalities, displacement, migration, racial discrimination, and institutional exclusion. It invites critical examination of how cultural practices both reproduce and challenge social hierarchies, whose histories are recognized or silenced, and how communities negotiate the meanings of authenticity, heritage, and belonging.
New Orleans offers a particularly meaningful context for these discussions, given its rich cultural traditions and complex histories of racial inequality, migration, displacement, and community resistance. From jazz and second-line parades to culinary traditions and neighborhood celebrations, cultural expression has played a significant role in preserving collective identities and responding to social and political transformations. However, the session extends beyond New Orleans, welcoming comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary perspectives on the relationships between culture, memory, and inequality.
The session encourages scholarship examining music and artistic expression as forms of political resistance, food and culinary traditions as markers of identity and belonging, storytelling and oral histories as practices of collective memory, and the role of cultural heritage in community organizing and social movements. Particular attention is given to how race, ethnicity, gender, social class, immigration, and place intersect to shape cultural experiences and opportunities for resistance.
Connecting to the 2027 Southern Sociological Society meeting theme, “Interdisciplinary Sociology: The Bridge to Engagement,” this session seeks to bring together scholars working across sociology, anthropology, history, cultural studies, ethnic studies, geography, and related disciplines. It welcomes theoretical, empirical, and community-engaged approaches that center historically marginalized voices and examine the relationship between cultural practices, structural power, and social transformation.
Ultimately, this session aims to advance sociological conversations about culture not simply as a reflection of social life, but as an active process through which communities preserve their histories, contest inequalities, and imagine more equitable futures.
To be considered, please submit an abstract (250-300 words), name, email, position, and university to Angela Vergara at an850645@ucf.edu no later than October 26, 2026.
**Please note that information provided here is what will appear in the program, so please include your name, affiliation, and contact information exactly as you want it to appear in the program.
Conservative Ideology, Trump and the MAGA Movement
In November of 2016, Donald Trump was surprisingly elected president of the United States. Although African American, Latinos and Asians voted overwhelmingly against him, Trump was able to win the election by capturing a sizable plurality of the white vote. In November of 2020, Donald Trump lost his election bid for a second term. However, as in 2016, Trump received the majority of white votes while African American, Latinos and Asians voted overwhelmingly against him. In November of 2024, Trump won reelection and, this time, won both the Electoral College and popular votes. Pundits, academics and the general public have been trying to understand why a person with such well-known flaws could be elected president of the United States twice. This session presents papers that attempt to apply sociological theory and research to help us understand the “Trump” phenomena and the MAGA movement generally. Important questions to be addressed include: 1) Why do whites in general support Trump?; 2) Why do specific white groups such as white men, evangelicals, and seniors strongly support Trump? and; 3) How do issues associated with race, class and gender impact U.S. elections generally and Trumpism specifically?
To be considered, please submit an abstract (250-300 words), name, email, position, and university to Melvin Thomas at melvin_thomas@ncsu.edu no later than October 26, 2026.
**Please note that information provided here is what will appear in the program, so please include your name, affiliation, and contact information exactly as you want it to appear in the program.
Gender, Sexuality, and Technology (Committee on Gender and Sexuality)
Technology plays a major role in how gender and sexuality are formed, expressed, policed, and monetized. Digital platforms often act as governing institutions that determine whose content circulates and which communities can find one another; generative AI has entered intimate life as companionship, as a first source of health information, and as a tool for producing non-consensual imagery; and reproductive and gender-affirming health technologies collect data that carries significant legal exposure across much of the South. This session invites papers on any dimension of that relationship. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, platform governance and content moderation, algorithmic visibility, AI and intimacy, dating markets, online community formation and migration, image-based sexual abuse, age verification, surveillance and data privacy, health technology and telehealth, digital organizing, and the gendered and racialized labor of building and moderating these systems. Work grounded in Southern and rural contexts is especially welcome.
To be considered, please submit an abstract (250-300 words), a brief biographical note (up to 100 words), name, email, position, and university to Harry Barbee at hbarbee1@jh.edu no later than October 26, 2026.
**Please note that information provided here is what will appear in the program, so please include your name, affiliation, and contact information exactly as you want it to appear in the program.
Race, Gender, and Civil Rights in the U.S. South (Committee on Gender and Sexuality)
We are seeking panelists for a panel session on race, gender, and civil rights in the U.S. South. Civil rights law has been substantially rewritten in the past four years, and the South is where the consequences land hardest. In Louisiana v. Callais (April 2026), the Court held that the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana’s second majority-Black district and struck the map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, a ruling widely read as making vote dilution claims nearly impossible to bring. In Students for Fair Admissions, race-conscious admissions became itself a constitutional violation. In Skrmetti and West Virginia v. B.P.J., the Court declined to extend heightened scrutiny to transgender people while upholding state restrictions on their medical care and athletic participation. Read together, these decisions treat remedial classification as the suspect act while withholding protection from the groups seeking it. The same provision now bars the remedy and declines the shield. The panel asks what sociologists, rather than legal commentators, should say about it: how institutions respond to legal ambiguity and where overcompliance exceeds what the law requires, what happens to families, clinicians, educators, and election administrators inside a patchwork where rights depend on residence, and what becomes of social scientific evidence when courts decline to credit it. We meet in the state whose map was at issue in Callais, one year on.
To be considered, please submit a brief biographical note (up to 100 words), name, email, position, and university to Harry Barbee at hbarbee1@jh.edu no later than October 26, 2026.
**Please note that information provided here is what will appear in the program, so please include your name, affiliation, and contact information exactly as you want it to appear in the program.
Gender, Sexuality, and Environmental Change (Committee on Gender and Sexuality)
People experience environmental change unequally. Who evacuates and who stays, who performs the unpaid work of recovery, who can afford insurance, who breathes what, and who is safe inside a shelter are all influenced by structures of gender, sexuality, race, and class, and the South is often where the impacts are most visible, absorbing a disproportionate share of hurricanes, flooding, extreme heat, and industrial pollution with thin public infrastructure to meet it. This session invites papers on any aspect of environmental changes that address gender or sexuality issues, broadly construed: disaster preparation, evacuation, and recovery; care work after environmental disruption; housing, insurance, and displacement; heat exposure among outdoor and domestic workers; environmental health and reproductive outcomes; extraction, land, and rural livelihoods; food and water insecurity; climate migration and family strategy; LGBTQ+ people in emergency response and shelter systems; the gendered composition of environmental movements; and cultural work around climate, masculinity, and consumption. Meeting in New Orleans, we especially encourage papers grounded in the Gulf South.
To be considered, please submit an abstract (250-300 words), a brief biographical note (up to 100 words), name, email, position, and university to Harry Barbee at hbarbee1@jh.edu no later than October 26, 2026.
**Please note that information provided here is what will appear in the program, so please include your name, affiliation, and contact information exactly as you want it to appear in the program.
Gender, Race, and the Business of Sport (Committee on Gender and Sexuality)
We are seeking panelists for a panel session on gender, race, and the business of sport. Sport is one of the few major institutions that openly sorts people by sex and then distributes money, attention, and opportunity along that sorting, and one in which Black athletes generate enormous revenue while ownership, coaching, and administration remain overwhelmingly white. This panel treats sport as a political economy and asks who plays, who pays, who profits, and who is employed, deliberately spanning levels of competition. Youth and travel sport now operates as a private market whose fees and showcase circuits sort children by family income long before recruitment. Interscholastic athletics are financed through district budgets and booster clubs that reproduce local inequality while nominally satisfying Title IX. College sport has been remade by name, image, and likeness deals and revenue sharing, reopening questions about athlete labor and about how new money moves across men’s and women’s programs. Professional women’s leagues are negotiating pay and media rights inside markets shaped by decades of underinvestment. Around all of it sits a large and largely unstudied workforce of coaches, trainers, officials, and service workers.
To be considered, please submit a brief biographical note (up to 100 words), name, email, position, and university to Harry Barbee at hbarbee1@jh.edu no later than October 26, 2026.
**Please note that information provided here is what will appear in the program, so please include your name, affiliation, and contact information exactly as you want it to appear in the program.
Teaching Gender and Sexuality in a Legislated Classroom (Committee on Gender and Sexuality)
We are seeking panelists for a panel session on teaching gender and sexuality in a legislated classroom. For a growing number of instructors in the U.S. South, teaching gender and sexuality is no longer a pedagogical question alone but a question about what state law permits. Three Southern states enacted new classroom censorship laws in 2026. North Carolina’s SB 558, passed over the governor’s veto, restricts how race and sex may be discussed on public campuses inside and outside the classroom and bars required courses from being even “related to” the concepts it lists. Elsewhere the constraint has been institutional: women’s and gender studies programs eliminated, departments consolidated, credentials in sexual orientation and gender identity phased out, faculty disciplined for classroom discussion. This panel is for people teaching under those conditions now, and it is organized around a sociological question as much as a practical one, namely what explains the gap between what these laws require and what institutions do preemptively. Panelists will vary by institutional position. The panel will discuss syllabus language, documentation practices, guidance on curriculum audits and recorded lectures, and approaches to protecting students in classrooms where their existence is the legislated topic.
To be considered, please submit a brief biographical note (up to 100 words), name, email, position, and university to Harry Barbee at hbarbee1@jh.edu no later than October 26, 2026.
**Please note that information provided here is what will appear in the program, so please include your name, affiliation, and contact information exactly as you want it to appear in the program.
Sociology at Work: Exploring Applied Career Paths
This panel explores careers in applied sociology, featuring professionals working in diverse sectors such as public policy, healthcare, education, and nonprofit organizations. Panelists will share insights into how they transitioned from academic training to applied roles, the challenges and rewards of their work, and the skills most valuable in their fields. Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions about job searches, workplace dynamics, and the real-world impact of sociological expertise. This session is ideal for students and scholars interested in leveraging sociological training beyond academia to address pressing social issues in practical settings. (Organized by the Committee on Professional Development and Practice.)
Three or more participants may submit a single proposal to co-present. If you have any questions, please contact bobbyJo.Otto@uga.edu with what you’re thinking about. Please email by 10/1/2026 with a title, an abstract describing the applied work you’ll be discussing, and the presenters’ contact information.
**Please note that information provided here is what will appear in the program, so please include your name, affiliation, and contact information exactly as you want it to appear in the program.
Intersections of Race and Religion
In recent years, scholarship on race and religion has come to the forefront, generating fruitful discourse both within and outside of the academy. Yet, there remains a need for globally relevant, theoretically driven, and empirically rooted studies that do not just include race but also shift our understanding of each field of study and the intersections between them. This includes studies that discuss how the sacralization of race and the racialization of religion are essential to maintaining a hierarchical order based on white supremacy, how racialized individuals and groups often exercise their own agency at the intersections of race and religion to challenge the dominant social order, and how religious organizations make durable or disrupt racial inequalities.
To address this gap, we invite paper proposals that cross boundaries and binaries constructed in studies of race and religion, both topically and disciplinarily. We will engage submissions that address all aspects of religion (including non-religion) and race, broadly construed; however, papers should substantively engage with critical race/diversity studies.
If you’re interested in this session, please email an extended abstract of 300-450 words, paper title, and author names/ affiliations to oneya.okuwobi@uc.edu no later than October 1, 2026.
**Please note that information provided here is what will appear in the program, so please include your name, affiliation, and contact information exactly as you want it to appear in the program.
How Does Changing the Name Change the Game? U.S. Perspectives on Participation, Access, and Belonging in Sociology
We invite papers that examine how changing institutional, disciplinary, and political contexts are reshaping conversations about participation, access, and belonging within the U.S. sociological context. (JEDI Committee session)
All paper submissions should include: (a) the title of the paper,* (b) names, affiliations, and contact information for each author,* and (c) an extended abstract. Extended abstracts should be approximately 300-450 words and organized with the following three section headings: Objectives, Methods, and Findings. These section headings may not apply to all submissions, so authors may modify as needed.
* Note that information provided here is what will appear in the program, so please include your name, affiliation, and contact information exactly as you want it to appear in the program by 9/25/2026 to kaseide@davidson.edu
How Does Changing the Name Change the Game? Global Perspectives on Participation, Access, and Belonging in Sociology
We invite papers that explore participation, access, and belonging from international and comparative perspectives, highlighting diverse institutional, cultural, and disciplinary contexts. (JEDI Committee session)
All paper submissions should include: (a) the title of the paper,* (b) names, affiliations, and contact information for each author,* and (c) an extended abstract. Extended abstracts should be approximately 300-450 words and organized with the following three section headings: Objectives, Methods, and Findings. These section headings may not apply to all submissions, so authors may modify as needed.
* Note that information provided here is what will appear in the program, so please include your name, affiliation, and contact information exactly as you want it to appear in the program by 9/25/2026 to kaseide@davidson.edu.
**Our first digest referred to the JEDI committee sessions as a mini‑conference. We’ve since received clarification that they are not a mini‑conference but two consecutive sessions.
Site of Memory, Sites of Struggle: Remembering and Reckoning with the Past
This session brings together interdisciplinary scholars examining the context of memorialization and the social processes through which communities remember, interpret, and contest histories of racial violence and injustice. As public debates over monuments, museums, historical markers, commemorations, and truth-telling initiatives continue to unfold, questions of whose histories are remembered, how they are represented, and to what ends have become increasingly consequential. Presenters will explore memorialization as a site of meaning-making, power, and collective memory, highlighting how acts of remembrance shape identities, public narratives, community relationships, and possibilities for social change.
All paper submissions should include: (a) the title of the paper,* (b) names, affiliations, and contact information for each author,* and (c) an extended abstract. Extended abstracts should be approximately 300-450 words and organized with the following three section headings: Objectives, Methods, and Findings. These section headings may not apply to all submissions, so authors may modify as needed.
**Note that information provided here is what will appear in the program, so please include your name, affiliation, and contact information exactly as you want it to appear in the program by 9/27/2026 to Sarah Gaby (gabys@uncw.edu) and Ashley Reichelmann (avr@vt.edu).
Mini-Conference: Hazard and Disasters – an interdisciplinary field
Organizers: Adam M. Straub (strauba@rowan.edu); Laura Becker (lauralb@vt.edu)
The study of hazards and disasters is inherently interdisciplinary, due to the intersection of social, biophysical, and built systems. Research from social sciences and humanities such as sociology, geography, anthropology, psychology, political science, philosophy, English, communications, and social work provides a rich tapestry of perspectives, theory, and methods. Disaster scholarship also requires the inclusion of physical sciences like meteorology, hydrology, marine sciences, agricultural sciences, climatology, seismology, and many more. Lastly, because of the ways in which our built environment is key to understanding disaster processes, engineering, city planning, and knowledge of various technologies and utilities are essential.
This mini-conference will highlight a variety of ways in which scholars practice interdisciplinary work across the field. We call for papers that highlight these intersections to showcase the value, utility, and potential of interdisciplinary work in the study of hazards and disasters.
You may submit extended abstracts of individual papers for potential inclusion in the Disasters Mini-conference. These abstracts will be organized into sessions by members of the organizing committee based on common themes. All regular paper submissions should include:
(a) the title of the paper.
(b) names, affiliations, and contact information for each author, and
(c) an extended abstract. Extended abstracts should be approximately 300-450 (max 405_ words and organized with the suggested three section headings: Objectives, Methods, and Findings.
(d) please email a copy of your extended abstract to strauba@rowan.edu (with SSS 2027 – disasters Mini Conference in the subject line) by 10/26/26.
**Please note that information provided here is what will appear in the program, so please include your name, affiliation, and contact information exactly as you want it to appear in the program.
Note: SSS policy requires that all participants listed in the program be current members of SSS and be registered for the annual meeting. You may join/renew your SSS membership and pre-register for the conference in the Membership Portal.