Guest Editor: Melinda Wiggins (Labor South: Center for Working Class Studies)

Southern Cultures, the award-winning, peer-reviewed quarterly from UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, encourages submissions from workers, organizers, artists, writers, and scholars for a special issue, Farm Labor, to be published Summer 2027. We will accept submissions for this issue through August 31, 2026, via Submittable.

The US South has long depended on a working class rooted in a legacy of unpaid labor. Enslaved workers not only built the agricultural empire in the South but laid the groundwork for the relationships between farmworkers and farm owners/agricultural producers that persist today. The modern agricultural industry continues to follow the old rules that exemplify the truism that race and class are inextricably intertwined and continually reinforce each other. While the industry was founded on an enslaved Black workforce, the majority of agricultural workers in the United States today are from Mexico and are undocumented. These economic migrants have left their homes not out of choice but because of economic necessity. Consequently, they face dangerous conditions, often working under oppressive conditions and coercive employers.

The system of who holds and who lacks power was built during the nation’s founding and heavily influences current power relationships between workers and owners in virtually every industry and sector of the US South. Through this special issue, we will explore ways this history is playing out in the agricultural industry today and how agricultural workers are increasingly demonstrating agency and demanding that their full lives are recognized, documented, and valued. 

Although we are living in a time with information at our fingertips, there is still a lack of awareness of agricultural workers’ daily lives, rituals, work, hardships, and rich cultural traditions. For this special issue, we call for submissions that reckon with and shed light on how misconceptions and inaccurate narratives of southern farming, such as the dominant myth of the white farmer, have been constructed in the public imagination around race, class, and labor. This issue centers on the voices of workers who are at the heart of corporate agricultural farms, including livestock operations, produce, and nurseries, as well as sustainable, small-scale farms and cooperatives. 

We encourage critical perspectives on how workers seek change, including labor activism, civic education, community organizing, and worker-driven social responsibility models. We are particularly interested in how farm labor connects to other organizing efforts in the US South and beyond. 

Submissions may explore any topic related to the theme, and we welcome investigations of the region in the forms Southern Cultures publishes: scholarly articles, creative nonfiction, memoir (first-person or collective), interviews, photo and art essays, and shorter feature essays. We are particularly interested in short firsthand narratives from workers in their native languages (including, for example, Haitian Creole–speaking nursery workers in Florida, Spanish-speaking migrant workers in South Carolina, and Guatemalan poultry plant workers in North Carolina). These will be presented bilingually in the final publication. Submissions should use plain language that is accessible to and usable by workers, organizers, and advocates. We are also looking for submissions that tell hidden truths, challenge, and inspire. 

Possible topics and questions to explore include but are not limited to:

• Agricultural organizing as forms of racial, class, and gender resistance
• The cultural practices of different worker communities, including food, dance, music, and art
• New expressions of agricultural activism, voice, and collective agency
• The role of consumers in southern farm labor today
• Solidarity and regional networks of farm labor in the South
• The diaspora-home binary for migrant workers who tend family connections in multiple locations. 
• Southern literary expression and farm labor—memoir, fiction, nonfiction
• The racial and ethnic diversity of southern agricultural communities 
• Racialized work arrangements in which workers are assigned different tasks based on their racial and/or ethnic identity 
• The legacy of plantation slavery in shaping current power dynamics between workers and employers
• The impact of slavery on contemporary farm production (including prison labor)
• Research revealing the origins and current deployment of the mainstream “whitewashed” image of rural and agricultural communities
• The material culture of southern farm labor 

As Southern Cultures publishes digital content, we encourage creativity in coordinating print and digital materials in submissions and ask that authors submit any potential video, audio, and interactive visual content along with their essay or artist’s statement. We encourage authors to gain familiarity with the tone, scope, and style of our journal before submitting. For full submission guidelines, please click here.

Header image: Workers head to lunch, SC, by Student Action Farmworkers interns Ben Pounds and Pedro Escobar, 2010.