Association of Western States Folklorists Pre-Conference
Wednesday, November 6, 2024
9:00am - 4:00pm
The Association of Western States Folklorists (AWSF) is an informal group of public folklorists, anthropologists, community scholars, students, ethnomusicologists, and anyone doing public folklore-related work across the Western United States. It began meeting in 1981 in Logan, Utah, with NEA support for the first two years. The group continued to meet annually in Logan, in conjunction with Utah State University’s Fife Folklore Conference, until 1993, when meetings began to move around the region, and WESTAF (now Creative West) hired Elaine Thatcher as folk arts coordinator and provided funding and logistical support. Its accomplishments include the establishment of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV. The last in-person meeting was held in Eugene, Oregon, in 2017, with communications continuing digitally in the interim.
For AWSF’s first in-person convening since then, we will be spending time discussing the future of AWSF and whether to begin in-person meetings again. We will also be discussing our digital efforts at forming community as well as the key issues faced by public folklorists and the communities we work with in the West.
We will feature a special session on disability as culture with Alisha Vasquez of the Southwest Folklife Alliance and will be given the opportunity to attend the Participatory Action Research workshop led by Selina Morales, Nelda Ruiz, Leia Maahs, and the Southwest Folklife Alliance.
Whether it’ll be your tenth or first time joining the group, you’re welcome to join us for this pre-conference session. We encourage everyone to register in advance at: https://tinyurl.com/awsf2024register. Limited financial support is available to those who need an extra night’s lodging to attend thanks to support from the American Folklore Society and Creative West.
Be sure to bookmark the schedule page for this program.
Alisha Vasquez
Alisha Vasquez is a krip, Chicana mama whose Tucsonense family has occupied the unceded homelands of the Tohono O’odham, Apache, and Yoeme people for six generations. Becoming a parent funneled all of her past experiences, knowledges, and beliefs into a new solidification of her values where she became a more joyous version of her analytical self. She honors her Mexican American-Tucsonense family, punk rock, living disabled, an acceptance and rejection of the academy, and existing within community as the epochs of her education until becoming a parent.
Vasquez holds a BA in History and Women's Studies from the University of Arizona and MA from San Francisco State University where her graduate work examined the rise neoliberal capitalism alongside multiple social movements in the United States, emphasizing disabled and Chicanx intersectional material realities. She taught middle school, high school, and college using these positions to resource the community. She is currently the Communications and Accessibility Manager Southwest Folklife Alliance / National Folklife Network; Co-Director of the Mexican American Heritage and History Museum at the Sosa-Carrillo House; and is following through on passion projects that use her training as an historian, community organizer, and educator to capture what it means to exist in so-called Tucson.