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Posts from the ‘Conferences’ Category

Oct 6

Streaming Video from #AFS11: Attend a Folklore Meeting Online!

Let the #AFS11 posts begin. The 2011 American Folklore Society meetings will be held here in Bloomington on the campus of Indiana University. This is the 1st time since 1968 that the meetings have been held on a college campus (that 1968 meeting was also here at IU). It may be a record meeting in terms of attendance and many innovative program items are going to be debuted. The first of these to mention, and the one of greatest potential interest to those who cannot attend, is the news that selected portions of the meeting will be accessible online via streaming video. In the remainder of this post (below the fold, so to speak) I will share the details. Highlights include the Opening Plenary Address by Henry Glassie  (“War, Peace, and the Folklorist’s Mission”), The Francis Lee Utley Memorial Lecture of the AFS Fellows by Margaret Mills “Achieving the Human: Strategic Essentialism and the Problematics of Communicating across Cultures in Traumatic Times”, and the AFS Presidential Address by C. Kurt Dewhurst “Museums and Folkloristics: Folklorists’ Legacy and Future in Museum Theory and Practice.” This is just a portion of the events that are scheduled to be streamed. Learn the details on how to do it and what is going to be accessible below. (The first two of these three major addresses relate to the conference theme–Peace, War, Folklore. This theme was chosen to articulate with the IU “Themester” theme of Making War, Making Peace. The full conference program is freely accessible here. It contains abstracts for all events.) Read more

Sep 30

Digital Humanities, Digital Culture Studies, and Computational Folklore at #AFS11

Dan Cohen recently wrote with enthusiasm about this year’s American Historical Association’s meetings being an inflection point in which digital humanities work in history has finally shown up on the meeting program in a significant way. (For DH at the MLA, see Ryan Cordell here.) Because it has been a steady presence for many years, the 2011 American Folklore Society meetings do not represent such a breakthrough moment, but such work is very much present on this year’s program. Importantly, such work is taking special advantage of the new poster exhibition and diamond (slide-driven, quick) formats. There are digital humanities presentations scattered throughout the program but here are some all-digital gatherings at #afs11:

  • Poster Exhibition: Folklore Studies and the Digital Humanities
  • Workshop: Introduction to Digital Audio Field Recording
  • Workshop: Preparing and Preserving Digital Folklife Fieldwork Materials
  • Author Meets Critics: Robert Glenn Howard’s Digital Jesus: The Making of a New Christian Fundamentalist Community on the Internet
  • Workshop: Learning with Librarians I: An Introduction to Copyright and Intellectual Property/ An Introduction to Open Folklore
  • Workshop: Learning with Librarians II: An Introduction to Digital Humanities and Online Information Resources
  • Diamond Session: Digital and Computational Approaches to Folklore I
  • Diamond Session: Digital and Computational Approaches to Folklore II
  • Paper Panel:  Media Culture and Multimodality in the Play and Games of Schoolchildren in the New Media Age

The entire conference program, with abstracts, is available form the AFS website, here: http://www.afsnet.org/?2011AM4

PS/Update:  Here is one that I missed:

  • Paper Panel: Mediated Affiliations and the Electronic Vernacular

Sep 20

5th IU-OSU Folklore and Ethnomusicology Student Conference: (Re)Framing & (Un)Mapping

(Re)Framing & (Un)Mapping
The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

February 17-18, 2012

Keynote address by
Dr. Michael Ann Williams
(Western Kentucky University)

We are happy to announce the 5th annual collaborative conference between The Ohio State University Folklore Student Association and the Folklore & Ethnomusicology Student Associations at Indiana University. This conference aims to create a space for graduate and undergraduate students to share their research in folklore, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, material culture, performance studies, and related disciplines connected to the study of academic and vernacular interpretation(s) of everyday life.

In “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” (1955), Gregory Bateson makes reference to an Andaman Island peace-making ceremony in which participants strike one another to enact, then dispel their anger. Investigating the fine line between play and aggression, Bateson writes, “(t)he discrimination between map and territory is always liable to break down, and the ritual blows of peace-making are always liable to be mistaken for the ‘real’ blows of combat.” Bateson’s example leads us to think about the “maps” that organize our interpretations of cultural “territories”: systems of meaning, practices of communication, and theoretical and ideological frames. Inspired by Bateson’s seminal text, this year’s conference seeks to explore the following questions and themes:

  • What devices do folklorists and ethnomusicologists use to (re)frame and (un)map? How are these concepts used to decontextualize, entextualize, and recontextualize?
  • How do ideological frames and maps translate to concrete realities, and vice versa?
  • What effect do frames and maps have on folk groups, music and culture?
  • What are the politics of mapping? How do previously unmappable things become mappable? How do things fall off the map? How do frames and maps work as boundaries that define what lies within and without, sameness and difference?
  • How have concepts of performance, play, ritual and literal frames affected theory and practice in folklore and ethnomusicology?
  • How have frames and maps guided thinking about space, place, land(scape), region and nation-state, and how have the latter complicated our understanding of the former?
  • In what other ways does current research engage with (re)framing and (un)mapping?

*We also welcome submissions on other topics.

The conference will have four opportunities for participation: 20-minute paper presentations, a poster session, 10-minute experimental panels for works-in-progress, and a discussion forum for all attendees. We will be accepting 250-word abstracts for all presentation formats, apart from the forum.

Abstracts must be submitted by November 18, 2011. Please email submissions to osu.iu.2012conference@gmail.com.

Register for this event for free at
http://osuiu2012conference.eventbrite.com/. For more information on the details of the conference visit http://cfs.osu.edu/fsa/studentconference in the coming months.

Center for Folklore Studies
Ohio State University
308 Dulles Hall
230 W. 17th Avenue
Columbus, OH 43210-1340
Phone: 614-688-3639
Fax: 614-292-1599
Email: osu.iu.2012conference@gmail.com
Visit the website at http://cfs.osu.edu/fsa/studentconference

Sep 10

The Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest

It has been several years now since I last taught my seminar on intellectual and cultural property issues in folklore and ethnology and I have not succeeded in keeping up with recent developments. In this context, I am especially glad that so many of my favorite colleagues have taken up work in this area. Thanks go to one of them, Alex Dent (Associate Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University and Associate Editor of Anthropological Quarterly [a awesome not-for-profit journal in its 84th year]) for calling to my attention the The Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest. I have signed the statement as an expression of my basic values in this realm and I support the project. Even if you feel differently, reading the declaration is a valuable learning experience. I urge folks with concerns about where we are and where we are going to take a look. Here is an excerpt.

The next decade is likely to be determinative. A quarter century of adverse changes in the international intellectual property system are on the cusp of becoming effectively irreversible, at least in the lives of present generations. Intellectual property can promote innovation, creativity and cultural development. But an old proverb teaches that “it is possible to have too much of a good thing,” and that adage certainly applies here. The burden falls on public interest advocates to make a coordinated, evidence-based case for a critical reexamination of intellectual property maximalism at every level of government, and in every appropriate institutional setting, as well as to pursue alternatives that may blunt the force of intellectual property expansionism.

Find the whole document in its organization, institutional, and policy context online at http://infojustice.org/washington-declaration. Thanks Alex!

Aug 10

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The Program for #AAA2011

Just got access to the preliminary program for the 2011 American Anthropological Association meetings this November in Montreal.

I will be participating in a AAA organized forum called The Future of AAA Publishing: A Forum for Discussion. In this event, I will address issues associated with green open access and the use of institutional (and other kinds of) repositories. This event begins at 1:45 on Friday afternoon.

I will also be part of a panel titled Digital Anthropology: Projects and Projections that has been organized by Kim Fortun. My presentation is Another World Is Possible: Open Folklore As Library-Scholarly Society Partnership. This panel happens first thing on Sunday morning.

I have only begun scouting out the program, but I see a lot of friends are scattered across it. I look forward to figuring out what is what and to attending.

Mar 22

AFS Meeting Program Proposals: Final Reminder

From an email circulated by Lorraine Cashman, AFS Associated Director:

This is your final reminder: the deadline for all proposals for the AFS 2011 annual meeting program is March 31.

If you intend to submit a proposal, please do so as soon as possible. The high volume of submissions increases the likelihood of difficulties in the final days of March. Please allow extra time for our part-time administrative staff to respond to your questions during business hours.

Remember, submitting your proposal requires registration, and to receive the members’ registration rate, you will have to Sign In at www.afsnet.org.

If you don’t know your password, you can reset it from the Sign In screen. If you don’t know your username, use the “Forgot your password?” link and enter your email address. If that address matches the one we have on file, you will still be able to sign in. If you have any trouble, please use the website to “Contact Us” — http://www.afsnet.org/general/?type=CONTACT.

When you are ready to submit your proposal, you will start the registration/submission process on the 2011 Annual Meeting page — https://afsnet.site-ym.com/?page=2011AM

Finally, please note that you can use the 2011 Annual Meeting Forum (www.afsnet.org/forums/) for meeting-related discussions. In particular, you can use the “Accommodations” forum topic to coordinate housing, transportation, childcare, or other local arrangements. If you have any suggestions for new annual meeting forum topics that will be useful later this year for those attending the meeting, please let me know.

Thank you for your support of our field and Society.

Lorraine Cashman
Associate Director

Nov 26

CFP: Making Sense of Visual Culture

From a circulated call for papers and participation…

Call for Participation

“Making Sense of Visual Culture”
An interdisciplinary conference sponsored by the Graduate Program in 
Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester
April 1st-3rd, 2011, Rochester, New York

Sound, taste, touch and smell. The institutionalization of the field of Visual Culture has coincided with a proliferation of methods to investigate a range of sensory experience.  More than conceiving of Visual Studies as an historical intervention into disciplinary art history, we seek to explore its ongoing development as a clearing house for investigation of what the visual does, and doesn’t do. With these concerns in mind, the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester invites scholars from across disciplines to discuss the evolving institutional and methodological contours of our field.  From April 1st-3rd, 2011, “Making Sense of Visual Culture” will address large-scale disciplinary questions as well the development of new approaches to an expanded range of sensory objects, phenomena, and practices.

In order to create a space for new voices on these topics, we have decided to eschew the standard figure of the keynote speaker and its implied authority.  Instead, we invite innovative work by graduate students and non-tenured faculty for a series of round-tables, workshops, and panels that will address the two major, interlinked concerns of the conference: sensory experience and the future of the field.

To this end, we envision this CFP functioning not just as a traditional call for papers, but also as a call for participation.  There are many ways to participate in this discussion, even if you cannot join us in April.

1. We are circulating a questionnaire. All responses will be posted to an open access website to create a broad dialogue. We are asking all scholars with an investment in the future study of visual culture to respond.  Select respondents will be invited to participate in a roundtable discussion at the conference.

2. We solicit 300-word abstracts for 20-minute paper presentations on work that exemplifies, challenges and expands the field of visual studies. Possible topics include, but are not limited, to:

– multi-sensory approaches to material culture and memory
– the “hegemony of the visual”
– the practice of visual culture as method, discipline or sensibility
– visualizing sensory experience
– cultural difference and the senses
– epistemology of the senses
– histories of perception
– lending form to affect
– synesthetia
– the interface of vision and touch
– changing practices of visualizing information
– the present and future of medium specificity (in both artistic and scholarly practices)
– the role of technologies in sensory perception

Please include a brief CV with your submissions.  Deadline: January 15, 2011.  Please email these documents to submissions@makingsenseconference.com

Nov 22

Fall Conference #5: SIMA Board Meeting and the AAA Annual Meeting #AAA2010

Last week I went quickly to New Orleans. I had not planned to go to the American Anthropological Association meetings this year, but my friend Candace Greene called a meeting of the Advisory Board for the Smithsonian Institution Summer Institute on Museum Anthropology. Candace direct’s this important NSF-funded summer training program (more about it soon) and I have been involved in its development since its formative stage. This coming summer will be the program’s third year of providing a month-long intensive training program in the use of systematic museum collections for advanced research in cultural anthropology and neighboring fields. The program attracts graduate students from across the United States and really fills an important need.

I arrived in New Orleans in time for an all-afternoon SIMA advisory panel meeting.  The program is preparing plans for its next three year cycle and our conversations focused on assessing what has been accomplished and building out for the future.  The meeting ended in time to catch up with fellow Oklahoma-ists Dan Swan, Michael Jordan, Jessica Walker and John Lukavic.. After dinner, I was able to attend one of many solid museum anthropology and material culture studies panels on the conference program.  John was a presenter on this panel (Making Meaning with Objects: Community Processes and Museum Practices) and presented a talk titled “Circulating Property and Knowledge: Intellectual Property and Cultural Knowledge Systems of the Southern Cheyenne.” John’s paper was one of many fine contributions to this panel.

The next day, before heading home, I was able fit in several meetings and a couple more excellent panels.  Two of my meetings were with journal editors eager to trade notes on the changing world of scholarly communication, including the practical possibilities of shifting to open access strategies.  The paper panel was “Museum Ethnography in Theory and Practice” organized by Jennifer Shannon and Christina Kreps.  I was not able to hear all the papers, but all that I did hear were excellent, as was the commentary provided by Eric Gable and Ann McMullen.  I also went quickly to see the poser session organized by Dan Swan–“Applying New Theories to Old Things: Museum Research Today.” The posters (and the projects that they represent) were all great.

Getting caught up in open access talk, I had to race to catch my plane with a real sense of anxiety.  I took the most impressive cab ride of my life.  The driver had no choice but to take me into some terrible rush hour traffic on I-10 going to the airport.  He used so many tricks to get there fast that it was mind boggling.  On many occasions, he bypassed long stretches of gridlock by exiting and then creatively cutting from off-ramps to on-ramps thereby getting back onto the interstate ahead of big blocks of stopped and slowed cars.  Had I been a driver in the vicinity I would have been out of my mind with irritation at his antics, but as a passenger worried about missing a flight, I was full of admiration.  It really was movie-quality cab driving.  It took an hour to get there and I know that he saved me 30 or more minutes.  NOLA has flat rates from downtown to the airport and this instance was the first time in which I thought that a taxi rate seemed way too low for the work done.  Needless to say, I was a generous tipper.  This cab ride may be the thing I remember most about the trip.

I left way early in the meeting and missed tons of promising panels and missed seeing scores of friends and colleagues.  Perhaps I can make a longer trip of it next year.

Nov 21

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Fall Conference #4: The Legacy of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Work

Soon after returning from the AFS meeting, I was fortunate to be a participant in an conference at IU organized by Joëlle Bahloul and Raymond J. DeMallie. The symposium was called After 100: The Legacy of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Work in 21st Century Arts and Humanities and it brought a large and diverse group of scholars to our campus to talk about the ramifications of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ scholarship. I enjoyed meeting some colleagues for the first time and reconnecting with some others. I also enjoyed returning to interests that I have had throughout the career. I appreciated being included and having the chance to host one of the panels. My thanks go to the organizers and all of the participants.

Nov 21

Fall Conference #3: American Folklore Society

A couple of days after returning from Oklahoma, I turned around and headed out again to the Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society.  Three main tasks filled my time during these meetings.  As was the case when I went to the American Anthropological Association meetings as a society editor, my AFS meetings are now mainly composed of business meetings taking place within the time and space of the scholarly meeting.  I saw very few scholarly presentations and I ate all of my lunches out of boxes inside the conference hotel, but the meeting was really productive from a work point of view.  The domains of my activity were focused on:  (1) the AFS Executive Board (of which I am a member), (2) the Teagle Foundation funded “Big Questions and the Disciplines” project on improving undergraduate instruction in folklore studies and (3) the launch of the Open Folklore portal site.

It is a honor to represent the AFS membership as a member of the society’s board. The crux of the story from my perspective as a board member is that the society and thus the board are in the midst of a very very busy and very positive time.  The broader context of our work as scholars in North America and in the United States is troubling, but our society has never been stronger. At the meetings, we heard an abundance of good news from the field, recognized many excellent people and projects with well deserved awards, and pushed forward on a number of initiatives. The Teagle grant project is one of these and Open Folklore is another, but great progress is being made on many fronts. I am thankful for all of the people who are helping the society thrive.

As a participant in the Teagle project, I had the pleasure of participating in a lively and rich panel discussion and then a working lunch meeting in which we reviewed our work of the past year and planned for further efforts in the year ahead. I am learning from all of the project’s participants and am especially grateful to Dorothy Noyes and Tim Lloyd for leading our efforts.

I have discussed the Open Folklore project and the portal launch in previous posts. I’ll just note again here how exciting I think that this project is and how appreciative I am for the chance to participate in it.  I had planned on discussing the Southeastern Native American Collections Project as part of an experimental panel in which colleagues and I were trying out a seven minute-twenty-one slide speed format panel. As the conference approached, I proposed a change in which I would present on Open Folklore instead.  The slides are available here and I hope to work up an audio slidecast very soon.  The experimental panel was a big success and we are planning to include the format in the 2011 AFS meetings in Bloomington.

Thanks to everyone who worked to make the Nashville meetings a success.

 

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