General Information
General Information: The American Folklore Society will gather for its 138th Annual Meeting in Asheville, North Carolina from October 27-31, 2026.
Conference Venue: The meeting will be held in the Renaissance Asheville Downtown Hotel with additional conference sessions, as well as some events, in the surrounding area where we have the opportunity to engage with and exchange ideas in local spaces. Spending time in those locations, such as the Center for Craft, will allow us to support and learn from folklore and arts organizations, craftspeople, and musicians. We look forward to taking advantage of meeting in this small, walkable downtown with a thriving creative community.
Accessibility: Guidelines for Accessible Presentations are available online and will also be available at the registration desk. AFS asks all presenters to read and follow these guidelines and to ask for assistance if needed.
In addition, staff will hold office hours during the summer to discuss and troubleshoot accessibility questions with presenters.
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 #afsam2
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.
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.