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Call for Papers: Ground

Guest edited by Elizabeth M. Webb (artist and filmmaker; Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Southern Cultures, the award-winning, peer-reviewed quarterly from UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, encourages submissions from scholars, writers, and artists for a special issue, Ground, to be published Spring 2027. We will accept submissions for this issue here through June 5, 2026.

This special issue of Southern Cultures engages ground as method. We are seeking projects that think from and with ground (rather than “about” it), offering southern soils as generative ways of knowing.

Ground here is both literal and conceptual. The particular grounds of the South—from dark, fertile soil to delta silt deposited over centuries to sandy coastal plains to red clay that sticks to the soles (or souls)—hold memory, time, and possibility. Ground is always-already in relation: never separate from water, air, what grows, and what decays. Soil texture, described by varying proportions of clay, sand, and silt, is one expression of this interdependence. Clay retains water but drains slowly, sand allows flow but doesn’t cohere, and silt accumulates as evidence of what has moved through. We’re interested in these and other material qualities of ground as openings for thought, practice, rebellion, and form. Ground can be fertile or depleted, stable or shifting, witness or accomplice. We consider southern groundedness—what it is to be grounded in this place, literally and imaginatively—in our relationship to dirt, and welcome visual art, poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction that engage these tensions and possibilities. 

This issue finds roots in Black geographies and Indigenous methodologies, thinking alongside Clyde Woods, Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter, Tiffany Lethabo King, Mishuana Goeman, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, among many others. We are interested in work that contends with complex sedimentary histories of place, thinking South as both a specific location and a site of ongoing spatial struggle. Our understanding of “the South” is expansive, acknowledging the region’s entanglements in histories of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, plantation slavery, and empire that connect it to broader Global South geographies of extraction, displacement, and resistance.  

Possible topics could include but are not limited to:

  • Soil/earth as archive: what ground holds, preserves, or refuses to release
  • Working materially: how ground’s physical properties guide making, thinking, and form
  • Southern dirt; how dirt marks, moves, and makes culture
  • Collaborative practices: art, agriculture, or inquiry that works with rather than extracts from ground 
  • Land-based practices, including mounds and earthworks; contemporary Indigenous land stewardship
  • Renewal and repair: reclamation, regenerative agriculture, and rewilding
  • Contested ground: land as relation or commodity, Indigenous sovereignty, dispossession, extraction, plantation logics
  • Burial grounds and sacred sites: ground as keeper of memory 
  • Erosion and accumulation: what wears away, what deposits, sedimentary layers of place
  • Contaminated ground: toxicity, environmental injustice, what pollutes and persists
  • Ground’s expansive relations: to water systems, foodways, climate, migration, labor, law, and other interconnected processes

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.

Submit

Elizabeth M. Webb is an artist and filmmaker from Charlottesville, Virginia. Her work is invested in issues surrounding race and identity, often using the lens of her own family history of migration and racial passing to explore larger, systemic constructs and the renegotiation of their borders. She has screened and exhibited in the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Ecuador, Singapore, Switzerland, Mexico, Spain, Austria, Norway and Germany, at venues including Vienna International Film Festival (Viennale), BlackStar Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, Birmingham Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Art Houston, and Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. She was a recipient of the inaugural Allan Sekula Social Documentary award in 2014 and her film Proximity Study (Sight Lines) received the jury award for Best Experimental Film at the 2022 New Orleans Film Festival and the Marian McMahon Award at the 2023 Images Festival. Elizabeth holds a dual MFA in Film/Video and Photography/Media from California Institute of the Arts and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program in Studio Art, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. She is co-editor with Roberta Uno and Daniela Alvarez of the anthology FUTURE/PRESENT: Arts in a Changing America (Duke University Press, 2024).

Header image: Elizabeth M. Webb, Boundary Exercise (On Perambulation) film still, 2022. 16mm film loop, color, silent. Total Running Time 264’ or one square chain or 7 min 20 sec.