//SOUTHS SYMPOSIUM
The American South is not a singular story but a complex, layered terrain shaped by history, ecology, and culture. Too often reduced to myths of decadence or decline, the South is, in reality, a dynamic landscape of resistance, reinvention, and intersecting identities.
Souths is a transdisciplinary symposium that challenges reductive narratives and amplifies untold stories across urban, suburban, and rural contexts. Through dialogue spanning geography, politics, foodways, storytelling, and infrastructure, this gathering seeks to uncover counterlandscapes revealing hidden truths and imagining transformative futures for the region and beyond.
Souths is a transdisciplinary symposium that challenges reductive narratives and amplifies untold stories across urban, suburban, and rural contexts. Through dialogue spanning geography, politics, foodways, storytelling, and infrastructure, this gathering seeks to uncover counterlandscapes revealing hidden truths and imagining transformative futures for the region and beyond.
//SCHEDULE
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2025
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Registration + Coffee
10:00 AM Symposium Welcome + Introductions
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM Panel 1: Southern Narratives of Resistance
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM Symposium Lunch (provided on-site)
*Optional Guided Tour of Homelands: Connecting to Mounds through Native Art
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM Panel 2: Care + Adaptation Across the Southern Landscape
3:00 PM - 3:30 PM Coffee + Coversation
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM Panel 3: Reimagining a Better South
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Closing Circle
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM Symposium Dinner (provided on-site)
8:30 PM After Party
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2025 — Excursions
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM 01: Walking Tour of Knoxville with Knoxville History Project
12:00 PM - 3:30 PM 02: Tour of Norris Dam
10:00 AM - 5:00 PM 03: Thunderhead Mountain Hike
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM 04: Conservation Fisheries Tour Hosted By Tennessee RiverLine
//MODERATORS
C.L. Bohannon
C.L. Bohannon, Ph.D., FASLA, is an Associate Professor in the Landscape Architecture Department and Senior Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs and Community Engagement at the University of Virginia. Dr. Bohannon is a nationally recognized scholar and educator specializing in community-engaged design, social and environmental justice, and African American landscapes, particularly in the American South.
Before joining UVA in 2022, Dr. Bohannon was an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Interim Director at Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture + Design. He also directed the Community Engagement Lab and served as a faculty principal at the Leadership and Social Change Residential College.
Dr. Bohannon's research and teaching focus on addressing social and environmental inequities in marginalized communities through community mapping, storytelling, and interdisciplinary study. Dr. Bohannon serves on the Board for the Landscape Architecture Foundation and was recently elected President for the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture.
Before joining UVA in 2022, Dr. Bohannon was an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Interim Director at Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture + Design. He also directed the Community Engagement Lab and served as a faculty principal at the Leadership and Social Change Residential College.
Dr. Bohannon's research and teaching focus on addressing social and environmental inequities in marginalized communities through community mapping, storytelling, and interdisciplinary study. Dr. Bohannon serves on the Board for the Landscape Architecture Foundation and was recently elected President for the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture.
Leah Kahler
Leah Kahler is a landscape designer and researcher whose work probes the socioecological legacies of the plantation landscape, focused on urban-rural connections through sites of labor, extraction, and production. Their work attends to the often-invisible dynamics of power, resource, and politics that shape the material processes of the built environment and produce meaning across space. Leah’s current project, conducted with support from the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, investigates the socio-ecological geographies of the global plant nursery trade through ethnographic fieldwork and archival methods.
Leah earned a Masters of Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia, where their research as a Benjamin C. Howland Fellow explored the possibilities of an abolition ecology through speculative fictions at the site currently known as the Louisiana State Penitentiary.While at UVA, Leah co-edited the 15th volume of LUNCH design journal, themed THICK. They were a 2021 Landscape Architecture Foundation Olmsted Scholar finalist, and she received the LAF Honor Scholarship in Memory of Joe Lalli, FASLA.
Kahler practiced with Reed Hilderbrand's Cambridge studio, where they played a key role in the design and construction of a 24-acre public park on the Tennessee River in Knoxville. Kahler has taught at the Boston Architectural College and more recently at University of Pennsylvania as the 2024-2025 McHarg Fellow where they received the G. Holmes Perkins Distinguished Teaching Award. They hold a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and the Growth and Structure of Cities from Bryn Mawr College.
Leah earned a Masters of Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia, where their research as a Benjamin C. Howland Fellow explored the possibilities of an abolition ecology through speculative fictions at the site currently known as the Louisiana State Penitentiary.While at UVA, Leah co-edited the 15th volume of LUNCH design journal, themed THICK. They were a 2021 Landscape Architecture Foundation Olmsted Scholar finalist, and she received the LAF Honor Scholarship in Memory of Joe Lalli, FASLA.
Kahler practiced with Reed Hilderbrand's Cambridge studio, where they played a key role in the design and construction of a 24-acre public park on the Tennessee River in Knoxville. Kahler has taught at the Boston Architectural College and more recently at University of Pennsylvania as the 2024-2025 McHarg Fellow where they received the G. Holmes Perkins Distinguished Teaching Award. They hold a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and the Growth and Structure of Cities from Bryn Mawr College.
Scottie McDaniel
Scottie McDaniel, MLA + M.Arch, is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture in the College of Architecture and Design and affiliated faculty with the Appalachian Justice Research Center at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is a designer, educator, and environmental researcher whose work focuses on rural land practices, visual storytelling, and participatory design in the American South.
Before joining UTK in 2018, McDaniel taught architecture at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and served as a Research Associate at the University of Stuttgart’s Institute of Land Planning and Ecology. She has contributed to design and research projects with Reed Hilderbrand, Landworks Studio, Höweler + Yoon, and Matthias Bauer Associates.McDaniel’s scholarship examines how resistance, resilience, and contested histories shape rural landscapes, particularly in Southern Appalachia. Her work investigates the ecological and political dimensions of land—specifically where tenure, stewardship, and identity intersect. In collaboration with social scientists, artists, legal scholars, and landowners, she develops alternative design methods to visualize and interpret complex issues of land justice and care-based stewardship. She positions design as a critical tool for advocacy, cultural memory, and community resilience—capable of navigating entangled histories and imagining more just, reciprocal futures.
Before joining UTK in 2018, McDaniel taught architecture at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and served as a Research Associate at the University of Stuttgart’s Institute of Land Planning and Ecology. She has contributed to design and research projects with Reed Hilderbrand, Landworks Studio, Höweler + Yoon, and Matthias Bauer Associates.McDaniel’s scholarship examines how resistance, resilience, and contested histories shape rural landscapes, particularly in Southern Appalachia. Her work investigates the ecological and political dimensions of land—specifically where tenure, stewardship, and identity intersect. In collaboration with social scientists, artists, legal scholars, and landowners, she develops alternative design methods to visualize and interpret complex issues of land justice and care-based stewardship. She positions design as a critical tool for advocacy, cultural memory, and community resilience—capable of navigating entangled histories and imagining more just, reciprocal futures.
//PANELISTS
Panel 01 : Southern Narratives of Resistance
Maurice Bailey
Maurice Bailey is the founder, President, and CEO of Save Our Legacy Ourself (SOLO), a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the culture, heritage, and agricultural traditions of the Saltwater Geechee people of Sapelo Island, Georgia. The son of renowned Sapelo Island griot, writer, and activist Cornelia Walker Bailey, Maurice has carried forward his mother’s vision of cultural preservation through agricultural revival since her passing in 2017.
Maurice began this work while serving on the board of the Sapelo Island Cultural and Revitalization Society (SICARS), a nonprofit his mother founded to secure a future for the people of Hog Hammock. In 2014, SICARS launched its agriculture program. By 2016, Maurice, then Vice President of SICARS, partnered with University of Georgia Professor Nik Heynen to co-direct the newly established Cornelia Walker Bailey Program on Land and Agriculture—an incubator supporting this revival.
In 2021, Maurice founded SOLO as a 501(c)(3) to continue and expand this work. SOLO's mission is to preserve cultural traditions while advancing food sovereignty on Sapelo Island. Working with partners, Maurice brought the first major product, Sapelo Island sugarcane, to market in 2020—featured in The New York Times. He is currently leading efforts to incubate and market other heritage crops including Geechee red peas, sour oranges, indigo, and garlic, using agriculture as a tool for cultural survival and economic self-determination.
Katie Burnett
Katie Burnett is the Associate Director of Transdisciplinary Programs at UTK's Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts. She is the author of Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820-1860 (LSU Press, 2019); co-editor of the essay collection, The Tacky South (LSU Press, 2022); and co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Literature of the US South (Routledge, 2022).
Her work has appeared in the Cambridge The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (Cambridge, 2025); the Cambridge Companion to Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction (Cambridge, 2022); the Cambridge History of the Literature of the U.S. South (Cambridge, 2021); the essay collection Southern Comforts (LSU Press, 2020); as well as the journals PMLA, College Literature, and the Southern Literary Journal (later south). You can find more info at www.katharineaburnett.com
Michelle Joan Papillion
Michelle Joan Papillion is a land steward, grower and arts entrepreneur working in Louisiana. Her work is research & observation based and is centered around the topics of shared economics, food systems and cultural heritage preservation. She spends a great deal of time documenting changes on her land and preserving the stories of the people that come from that land.
In 2020, Michelle created an oral history archive that consists of audio and video recordings of communities in Southwest LA. The archive is meant to preserve what they felt was important to be remembered long after their departure. Michelle has been interviewed and profiled in numerous publications and podcasts about her work in arts and culture and have given a TEDx talk about her practices on both. Her farm is called Royal Queen Farms and is a project meant to generate healing, calm, legacy and beauty. The farm grows food, flowers and native herbs and botanicals. Michelle is the co-founder of the Cudmén Cooperative. It is a collective of growers, land stewards, creatives and elders, that work together to build the future they want to actualize. Their mission is about creating sustainable practices that protects our eco-system while enabling mutual elevation amongst the collective.
In 2020, Michelle created an oral history archive that consists of audio and video recordings of communities in Southwest LA. The archive is meant to preserve what they felt was important to be remembered long after their departure. Michelle has been interviewed and profiled in numerous publications and podcasts about her work in arts and culture and have given a TEDx talk about her practices on both. Her farm is called Royal Queen Farms and is a project meant to generate healing, calm, legacy and beauty. The farm grows food, flowers and native herbs and botanicals. Michelle is the co-founder of the Cudmén Cooperative. It is a collective of growers, land stewards, creatives and elders, that work together to build the future they want to actualize. Their mission is about creating sustainable practices that protects our eco-system while enabling mutual elevation amongst the collective.
Panel 02 : Care + Adaptation Across the Southern Landscape
Shane Mitchell
Journalist and author Shane Mitchell frequently reports on consequential crops and food histories in the American South. She has five James Beard Foundation awards, including the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing prize in 2023 for her essay "Blood Sweat & Tears" on field labor abuse. Her book The Crop Cycle: Stories with Deep Roots was longlisted for the Pen America Art of the Essay prize earlier this year. These stories are framed by personal connections to Southern culture but also address broader conversations tied to race, labor relations, civil rights, and agriculture. Her most recent story for The Bitter Southerner Issue #11, "The Unusual Door," is partly set in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Catherine Coleman Flowers
Catherine Coleman Flowers is an internationally recognized environmental activist, MacArthur “genius” grant recipient and author. She has dedicated her life’s work to advocating for environmental justice, primarily equal access to clean water and functional sanitation for communities across the United States.
Founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ), Flowers has spent her career promoting equal access to clean water, air, sanitation and soil to reduce health and economic disparities in marginalized, rural communities. Flowers sits on the Board of Directors for the Climate Reality Project, the Natural Resources Defense Council and RMI, as well as serving as a Practitioner in Residence position at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.
In 2021, her leadership and fervor in fighting for solutions to these issues led her to one of her most notable appointments yet — Vice Chair of the Biden Administration’s inaugural White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. In 2023, she was recognized as one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the world and was featured on Forbes’ 50 Over 50 list. Flowers is the author of the newly-released Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope and Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret. Holy Ground is an inspiring collection of unflinching essays, personal and political, that frames the challenges we face as a society and — with grace, generosity, and hope — charts the way toward equity, respect, and a brighter future.
In Waste, Flowers shares her inspiring story of advocacy, from childhood to environmental justice champion, and discusses sanitation and its correlation with systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that affects people across the United States.
Flowers and her work have been profiled by CBS’s 60 Minutes, The New York Times, The
Washington Post, The Guardian, PBS Newshour and more.
Learn more at www.catherinecolemanflowers.com.
Founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ), Flowers has spent her career promoting equal access to clean water, air, sanitation and soil to reduce health and economic disparities in marginalized, rural communities. Flowers sits on the Board of Directors for the Climate Reality Project, the Natural Resources Defense Council and RMI, as well as serving as a Practitioner in Residence position at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.
In 2021, her leadership and fervor in fighting for solutions to these issues led her to one of her most notable appointments yet — Vice Chair of the Biden Administration’s inaugural White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. In 2023, she was recognized as one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the world and was featured on Forbes’ 50 Over 50 list. Flowers is the author of the newly-released Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope and Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret. Holy Ground is an inspiring collection of unflinching essays, personal and political, that frames the challenges we face as a society and — with grace, generosity, and hope — charts the way toward equity, respect, and a brighter future.
In Waste, Flowers shares her inspiring story of advocacy, from childhood to environmental justice champion, and discusses sanitation and its correlation with systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that affects people across the United States.
Flowers and her work have been profiled by CBS’s 60 Minutes, The New York Times, The
Washington Post, The Guardian, PBS Newshour and more.
Learn more at www.catherinecolemanflowers.com.
Kim Smith
Kim Smith is dedicated to community conservation and Indigenous advancement. She leads regional initiatives, fosters community-led conservation efforts, and advocates for environmental stewardship. In addition to her conservation work, Kim is the proud owner of Tali Elohi, an Indigenous-led business offering consultation services that harness the strength of diversity to craft innovative strategies. Tali Elohi goes beyond consulting by promoting Indigenous identity through fashion and design, enriching communities with creativity and tradition. Kim’s fashion designs and models have hit the US runways across the continent. Rooted in her Ancestral homelands, Kim divides her time between Knoxville, TN, and Cherokee, NC, where she resides with her two daughters. Together, they enjoy playing softball and immersing themselves in local Indigenous perspectives during their frequent travels. Kim's academic background includes a BA in French and World Business, as well as an MBA in Entrepreneurship & Innovation with specializations in Marketing and Nonprofit Management from the University of Tennessee.
Panel 03 : Reimagining a Better South
Ashon Crawley
Ashon Crawley is professor of religious studies and African American and African studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Blackpentecostal Breath: the Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press, 2016) and The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press, 2020). His audiovisual art has been featured at Second Street Gallery, Bridge Projects, the California African American Museum, and the National Mall in Washington, DC. All his work is about otherwise possibility.
J.T. Roane
J.T. Roane is author of the award winning book Dark Agoras Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU 2023). He co-directs the Black Ecologies Lab at Rutgers. Roane's work has been supported with fellowships from Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard's Charles Warren Center, and the Schomburg Library and Research Center, New York Public Library as well as grants from the Social Science Research Council and the Spencer Foundation. Roane currently serves on the board for an Indigenous and Black led food and environmental justice organization in Virginia's Tidewater, Just Harvest.
Tiffany Sturdivant
Tiffany Sturdivant (she/her) is a Florida-born, Mississippi-raised Southern girl. In her former career, she was a healthcare professional (Nurse) for 13 years. Her expertise spanned across home healthcare, pediatrics and geriatrics. She was also a community activist in Columbus, MS, where she spent a decade leading a youth-based nonprofit organization focused on growing the community through fun and festivals. Tiffany is a voting rights advocate and has assisted with voting rights restoration in both Mississippi and Alabama. Now a resident of Eastern Kentucky, she is Executive Director of Appalshop. She is also lead organizer of Performing Our Future, a national coalition of four delegations (Alabama, Kentucky, Maryland, and Wisconsin) where we co-create and share knowledge to collectively own what we make. She enjoys singing, dancing and changing the world one day at a time.
