General Information: The American Folklore Society will gather for its 137th Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, from October 18 to 21, 2025. The Virtual Meeting sessions will take place November 12-14, 2025.

Conference Venue: Crowne Plaza Atlanta - Midtown. At Crowne Plaza Atlanta - Midtown, self-parking is available for a daily rate of 36 USD and valet parking is available for a daily rate of 50 USD. Several paid parking garages are available nearby, Plan for high demand, especially on event days. Public transportation & Ride Share information (pending)

Registration: Registration is required for attendance at all sessions and meetings. The meeting registration desk is located in the Lobby of the Crowne Plaza Atlanta - Midtown. Registration hours are:
Saturday, October 18: 6:00 - 9:00pm
Sunday, October 19: 7:30am - 6:30pm
Monday, October 20: 7:30am - 6:30pm
Tuesday, October 21: 7:30am- 2pm

Questions, Concerns, and Emergencies: The registration desk staff will do their best to find answers to questions or solutions to problems. The registration desk also serves as the meeting’s lost and found center, and provides information about AFS membership, publications, and activities. In case of an urgent issue after the registration desk is closed, look for signage about off-hours contact.

In an emergency, or if you have immediate concerns about safety, get help from security or the police first:call security on a hotel phone in the guest rooms, ask for help from any venue staff person who can radio for assistance, or use a phone to call the police at 911. When you are safe, report the incident to AFS staff.

Quiet Room: The Lower Level is the Quiet Room and reserved for those who want to work or just enjoy some relative peace in the midst of our busy meeting. Please remove yourself from this room for conversation, phone calls, or any other potentially disruptive activity. Hours of availability are posted in the schedule.

Room for Families: Please ask the Registration desk for support, space varies each day.

Breastfeeding/Pumping Parents: Visit the registration desk to inquire about a room for breastfeeding or pumping.

Accessibility: Guidelines for Accessible Presentations are available as a printed hand-out at the registration desk and online at: americanfolkloresociety.org/ourwork/meeting/information-for-presenters/accessible presentations/AFS asks all presenters to read and follow these guidelines and to ask for assistance if needed.

Broadcast sessions: A limited number of broadcast sessions are being offered at the annual meeting this year. “Join Session” links will be visible on session detail pages the day of the session, but not before. Can’t see them that day? Log in!

Since broadcast sessions will be recorded and available for asynchronous access afterwards, our limited tech support staff will prioritize aiding broadcast presenters. If you are a viewer and cannot log in, we invite you to contact us, but we may not be able to assist you in time to attend the live session.

View Recordings: Recordings of some sessions and events will be added about a day after they occur. Go to the session details page to find the video. Recordings will be available through early 2026.

Presenting: Visit the AFS website for full Information for Presenters: americanfolkloresociety.org/our-work/meeting/information-for-presenters.

We urge all presenters to stay on schedule. Keeping to the published schedule makes it possible for audience members to find the presentations that interest them.

Follow the schedule of presentations as it is published in program material, with adjustments only as noted by program chairs when necessary.

Local Time: All Sessions are listed in Eastern Time (ET).

Social media use: AFS supports social media as a mode of communication that can complement our annual meeting. However, it is not the best way to communicate with AFS. If you have questions or concerns about AFS policies or meeting implementation, it is important that you contact us directly at annualmeeting@afsnet.org. AFS expects all meeting participants to adhere to our standards of professional annual meeting behavior in all contexts surrounding annual meeting participation, whether digital, analog, or in-person; as the social media community and its norms continue to emerge and evolve, we particularly ask social media users to be mindful of the standards of ethical engagement below. Although we use Twitter as an example in this policy statement, the basic framework and principles described here are meant to be applied across all social networking platforms.

Consent: Do not use any visual or audio recording devices to record presentations without the express approval of the presenter. The session chair should take steps to communicate the presenters’ preferences at the start of the session, and at the beginning of each individual presentation where the presenter does not give consent to record. Audio and video recordings of sessions should not be made or posted without the permission of all panelists or seminar members, ideally secured through the chair in advance of the session. Any speaker has the right to request that their work and comments not be tweeted. Please ask subjects involved before posting and tagging photos.

Professional tone: The meeting hashtag represents an extension of the conference online. As such, we encourage participants to consider their comments to be public, avoiding remarks that would be inappropriate in other professional spaces. Fair quotation: Live-tweeting often represents itself as a transcript of spoken words. Tweeters should be aware of the potential for misrepresentation, appropriation, and removal of context. It is important to attribute tweets with a speaker’s handle or full name (e.g. @handle:xxx); presenters’ handles may be found in the program book’s index of presenters. Retweeting and favoriting can remove tweets from temporal sequence, so it is best to attribute individual tweets, rather than just the first in a sequence. For more guidelines, see: blog.historians.org/2013/03/the-dos-and-donts-of-live-tweeting-at-anacademic-conference-an-update

Social Media Access: Follow AFS on Facebook and Instagram @americanfolkloresociety. Track posts about the meeting with the hashtag #afsam25

Accessibility: AFS strives to ensure that all meeting participants have equal opportunities to engage in and contribute to its annual meeting. AFS selects only ADA-compliant meeting venues. Presenters and attendees are encouraged to request accommodations that will support their full participation in the conference; email annualmeeting@afsnet.org at least 60 days before the meeting.

AFS has developed guidelines for conference presenters for an in-person gathering and for virtual events for conference presenters to follow in order to make their work more accessible to all. AFS asks all presenters to read and follow these guidelines and to ask for assistance if needed.

https://americanfolkloresociety.org/our-work/meeting/information-for-presenters/accessible-presentations/

https://americanfolkloresociety.org/our-work/meeting/information-for-presenters/accessible-virtual-presentations/

As in-person meeting attendees may experience multiple chemical sensitivities, please refrain from wearing all perfumes and use fragrance-free, unscented personal care products for the duration of our event.