Program

Conversation with Academic Program Leaders: Sustaining Higher Education Infrastructure in Folklore Studies.Hosted by the AFS Executive Board and Academic Programs Task Force Periodically, the AFS Executive Board invites folklore program heads to discuss issues they face in their work to lead academic programs. With challenges faced by universities, including widely known situations at some universities with folklore programs, this meeting of program leaders offers a session focused on the state of academic programs across our field. Representatives from programs across the discipline are invited. Light breakfast will be served.

Part 1: Introduction and Conversation (25 minutes) Part 2: Archival performance excerpt and reflection (20 minutes) Part 3: Demonstration and workshop with Korean music (20 minutes) Part 4: Q & A (20 minutes)

Chair: Lisa Gilman There is no recording of this session, per request of Chair and panelists.

Forum Chair: Cristina Bacchilega. Co-Chair: Veronica Schanoes. Storytellers have practiced restorying across time and space to counter disenfranchisement, neglect, or erasure; this continues today across cultures and media and in the interplay of folktale, fairy tale, and popular culture; and folklorists participate in the restorying of metanarratives such as folk-narrative and fairy-tale studies. How does justice figure in the restorying of fairy-tale studies today? What is at stake in this restorying for folklore studies? Drawing on recently published and in-progress work, Forum contributors consider these questions in two general areas, that of the subordinated/marginalized human in fairy-tale studies, and that of the non- or more-than-human. Let’s discuss.

Chair: Olivia Phillips

Chair and Discussant: Daniel Reyes

Chair: Maria Kennedy

Chair: Jon Kay

Sponsored by Music and Song Section, Folklore and History Section, plus external sponsors of Traditional Song Forum and Kommission für Volksdichtung (International Ballad Commission). Chair: Michael Bell.

Workshop

• Workshop

Forum Chair: Sarah Craycraft

Chair: Tim Lloyd Please note: the first 10 minutes of the recording have weak audio. This was corrected for the remainder of the session.

Chairs: Kait Glasswell and Emily Hartlerode

Chair: Mary Magoulick

Chair: Ciara Bernal

Sponsored by the Folklore and Education Section. Forum Chair: Paddy Bowman

Chair: Meghal Karki

Chair: Lee Bidgood

Chair: Debra Lattanzi Shutika

Private Session: Folk Arts Partnership Professional Development Institute cohort Members of the Folk Arts Partnership Professional Development Institute cohort are invited to participate in a conversation and collaborative activity to engage the following questions: What first drew you into cultural work, and what still keeps you inspired? When have you felt most proud of your role in sustaining traditions? What story from your work always makes you smile? Light refreshments will be served. This is a closed session specifically for the Folk Arts Partnership Professional Development Institute.

Facilitated by Jason Jackson. Are you interested in helping make folklore work more accessible to more people in, and beyond, our field? From hand-folded zines to full-length documentary films, from rigorously argued journal articles to atmospheric museum exhibitions, folklorists make and share diverse work in a vast range of media. But how might we best do that sharing? This question is important in new ways in an era of great environmental and societal challenges. One needs only curiosity, not expertise, to join the Open Folklore project. As the project enters a new era, you are invited to this meetup to share ideas and learn more.

Chair: Marisa Wieneke,

Chair: Tim Lloyd

Chair: Deborah Kapchan

Possibilities, Challenges, and Strategies for Museums to Grow, And For Collections To Be Made More Accessible in Times of Political Turmoil. Forum Co-Chairs: Tom O'Dell and Lizette Gradén. Sponsored by the Folklore and Museums Section and Independent Folklorists Section.

Co-Chairs: Wuerxiya Wuerxiya and Thomas Jackson.Wuerxiya Wuerxiya will introduce the presenters; Thomas Jackson will present closing remarks. This paper explores the practice of Bai tie-dye textiles through exhibition, production, and circulation at the Bai Tie-Dye Museum in Zhoucheng Village, Yunnan. Through local museum narratives and Chinese intangible cultural heritage policy, traditional textiles are recontextualized for public display and tourist consumption. The presentation will focus on three key areas: the museum’s role in preserving tradition, the ICH inheritor’s efforts in transmitting skills, and the impact of tourism on craft production. Drawing on fieldwork in Dali, this research examines how local museums contribute to shaping Bai identity and sustaining intangible cultural heritage in contemporary China.

Co-Chairs: Marilyn White and Michelle Lanier

Facilitated by Emily Hilliard with Kay Turner and Betsy Peterson

Chair: Elena Andrews.

Chair: Susan Roach

Chair and Discussant: Sean Galvin

Co-Chairs: David Todd Lawrence and Heather Shirey. While street art is often dismissed or even criminalized for its perceived “destructive” rather than “restoring” role in urban space, this panel explores the critical role of street art as a form of vernacular expression and its role in “restorying” urban spaces, reclaiming marginalized narratives, and fostering community dialogue. Despite its ephemeral and often contested nature, street art provides a powerful lens through which to understand the ongoing negotiation of identity, memory, politics, and power within the urban landscape. This panel will explore the emotional and political dimensions of street art as vernacular expression - a form of specialized communication in public space.

Co-Chairs: Solimar Otero. and Anthony Bak Buccitelli. Forum members: Eric Mayer-García, Gregory Hansen, Erica Acevedo-Ontiveros, Benedictine University, Lisa Gabbert, Utah State University How are folklore studies and performance studies currently connected? There has been an intimacy between these two fields and phenomena since the mid-20th century. Whether it be through the work of Richard Bauman, Erving Goffman, Charles Briggs, Dell Hymes, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, or Kay Turner, the relationship between folklore and performance represents a long history of engagement that is both explicit and implicit in expressing interconnected methods, perspectives, and theoretical orientations. This forum on the volume, Emerging Perspectives in the Study of Folklore and Performance, foregrounds the ways that folklore and performance continue to inform each other in generative ways.

The recording for this panel is incomplete. Thank you for your understanding. Chair: David Sandell This session addresses expressive culture in aesthetic production, ways of speaking, stories, songs, and other performances for their interventions into the politics of places, whether in Texas, New Mexico, farther south, north, east, west, or in Mexican American Studies and academia. The interventions occur with mention of or reference to, for example, Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa, George I. Sánchez, Américo Paredes, and Gloria Anzaldúa. They sustain legacies of resistance to the things that aren’t right—economic, political, and ideological persecution—and create the temporal and spatial dimensions of the borderlands.

Chair: DeVante Love

Chair: Matthew Cheeseman

Sponsored by the Children's Folklore Section. Chair: Barbara Hillers. As many as 50,000 school children contributed to Ireland’s Schools’ Collection, a collaboration between the Irish Folklore Commission and the Department of Education in 1937-38. This massive collection (now available online at duchas.ie) is particularly rich in children's lore. Our panel is devoted to three games from this trove, with the panelists analyzing three different games, each attested in many individual versions. Collected and articulated by the school children, the game descriptions express the children's perspective. Games such as ‘Thread the Needle’, Ghost in the Garden’ and ‘Green Gravel’ simultaneously express children’s social and psychological needs and offer imaginative escape.

The summary of the 2024 session, written by Mathilde Lind, is available here, courtesy of the University of Illinois Press, which has made several pieces available free and accessible through November.

Missing Stories and Moving Forward: A Discussion of Ziying You’s Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Chinese and Chinese American Women Chair: Xinyang Li.

Chair: Moira Marsh. Discussant: Michael J. Bell

Chair Riki Saltzman. Traditional foods are often but not always linked to place, which enhances their ability to represent and reproduce identity for groups, regions, and nations. Over time, this identity becomes conflated with heritage, which, when marketed, becomes available for cultural consumption—by locals, tourists, and pilgrims. This panel looks at a variety of foods—in Sicily, Shirakawa-gō, Vermont, and West Africa—and examines their relationship to UNESCO’s ICH designation, concepts around authenticity, and heritage preservation. Papers will explore culinary pilgrimage, claims over ownership, place-based food, and cultural revitalization.

Chair: Kurt Baer. Examining the ties between sound, silence, foodways, and identity, this session interrogates the relationship between the cultural meanings surrounding foodways and individual sensory experiences. The panel draws upon historical and ethnographic case studies concerning cooking and consuming tarua fritters in Nepal; the rise and fall of sonic aging in American whiskey circles; and Dolly Johnson, White House cook for Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland. Together, these cases investigate the stories held in the production and consumption of food and drink and interrogate the ties between taste and other values, stories, modes of sensation, cultural contexts, aesthetics, and notions of identity.

Sponsored by Music and Song Section, Folklore and History Section, plus external sponsors of Traditional Song Forum and Kommission für Volksdichtung (International Ballad Commission). Chair: Hilary Warner-Evans

Sponsored by the Folklore and Education Section.

Sponsored by the Music and Song Section.

Publik Draft House. 654 Peachtree St NE. Some of us will probably meet up in the hotel lobby 5:35 or 5:40 to walk over.

No social media posts of any kind are permitted at this event.