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Posts from the ‘Conferences’ Category

Nov 8

Western States Folklore Society Meetings

Having been asked to do so, I am very pleased to help spread news of next spring’s Western States Folklore Society Meetings, which are slated to be held at Willamette University (WU) in Salem, Oregon. The dates are April 16-17, 2010. Details on the meeting follow the break and more information on the society and its meetings is also found on the WSFS website, at: http://www.westernfolklore.org . Founded in 1941, WSFS in an important professional society for folklorists and is the publisher of Western Folklore, a key journal that is widely read in the field.
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Oct 1

Presenting at an Information Technology Conference Tomorrow!

It would have seemed unimaginable a few years ago, but these days weird stuff happens more and more often. Tomorrow I will be presenting at the Statewide IT Conference put on by Indiana University.  The conference will be held at our campus in Indianapolis (IUPUI). I will be speaking about my experiences using Open Journal Systems to publish Museum Anthropology Review in partnership with the wonderful folks at the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries. I love every aspect of my experiences getting MAR up and running.  My friends and colleagues in the fields of museum and material culture studies have really done wonderful work with, and for, the journal.  As important are all of the great folks at the library’s IUScholarWorks and Digital Library Programs who have have done so much to make it happen behind the scenes. And a great piece of open source software–OJS–is also crucial to the effort.  I am so thankful for the hard work of so many people in the open source and open access movements. In this case, I am particularly thankful for the Public Knowledge Project and its funders. Thanks go as well to community of open access anthropology advocates and pioneers.

I learned a lot trying to speak to the CIC librarians last May. I am guessing the IT community will teach me a great deal tomorrow as well.

Aug 8

Scholarly Society-Library Partnerships Webcast Now Online

The video archive version of the recent Association for Research Libraries (ARL) webcast on “Reaching Out to Leaders of Scholarly Societies at Research Institutions” to which I contributed is now available online.  It can be gotten to for free, all that is required is signing in for ARL headcounting purposes.  Watching it in this way provides the same content experienced when the program was being done live.  The event lasted one hour.  Jennifer Laherty and I were the first of two pairs of speakers.  We present after about five minutes of introduction from the ARL staff organizers who spoke on the general goals of the initiative of which the program was a part.  Q&A follows the second presentation on data projects in astronomy (by Sayeed Choudhury and Robert Hanisch). Find the webcast via a link available here:  http://www.arl.org/sc/faculty/coi/COIwebcast2009.shtml.

Jul 26

My First Webcast

I have been honored with an invitation to participate in a webcast being organized by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). The hour-long event is focused on the ways that librarians at research libraries can assist and partner with faculty members who play leadership roles in scholarly societies, particularly in the areas of scholarly communications and large-scale discipline-wide data curation projects. The story of my work partnering with my friends at the IUB libraries is intended to explicate the first of these two foci. Astronomy-related projects at Johns Hopkins will relate to the second emphasis. My conversation partner Jennifer Laherty (IUScholarWorks Librarian) and I will chat for about 20 minutes followed by the team from Johns Hopkins.  There will be questions from the “audience” at the end.  Beyond the significance of the key issues the event aims to address, the technology to be used is really interesting to me.  I’ll be on the phone, but those who sign up (its free) to participate, will experience the event through their web browsers.  Questions can be asked online and will be presented by the moderator from ARL.  When it is all over, the webcast may get repackaged as a video and made available via ARL’s (or SPARC’s?) video offerings online.

Information on the event, including sign up information, can be found here:
http://www.arl.org/sc/faculty/coi/COIwebcast2009.shtml

This link will also lead you to related materials that ARL has developed as part of its Campus Outreach Intiative.

Thanks to Jennifer and the good people at ARL for this opportunity. I hope that I can say some things of wider value.

Mar 29

Public/Private Conference

Congratulations to all of the organizers, funders, presenters, listeners, friends, performers, discussants and others who made the recent Public & Private conference at Indiana University a big success.  Held March 27-28, 2009, this was the second in a projected series of conferences jointly organized by the folklore students at The Ohio State University and the folklore and ethnomusicology students at Indiana University Bloomington. This year’s conference attracted students from a number of different U.S. graduate programs, featured excellent keynote presentations by Jim Leary of the folklore program at the University of Washington and Richard Bauman of Indiana University, and was concluded by a very memorable (sometimes hilarious) coffeehouse featuring a diversity of music, dance and poetry performances by members of the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. There was a first rate poster presentation and undergraduate as well as graduate student participants did fine work with both paper and poster presentations.  There was plenty of food and good conversation. I am really appreciative of, and impressed by, all the hardwork that so many colleagues invested into this big event.

Theoretically, the conference also did significant work, as many of the papers and discussions focused tightly on the conceptual issues evoked by the meeting theme. Some smart brainwork was built upon good ethnographic and historical research and I think that all of the participants came away from the meetings with an improved tool kit with which to think critically about the nature of these productive but slippery conceptions.

The URL will surely no be stable, as information for what was an uncoming conference becomes legacy content, but the program can presently be found online here. Related material should appear eventually in IU ScholarWorks Repository.

Good work everyone.

Mar 19

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The Form of Value in Globalized Traditions

Recently, I had a unique and wonderful opportunity to participate in a small conference and workshop hosted by the Center for Folklore Studies at The Ohio State University (in partnership with the Berkeley Folklore Program).  Titled “The Form of Value in Globalized Traditions,” the workshop continued an ongoing series of discussions that were inaugurated in 2007 by Charles L. Briggs at the University of California, Berkeley.  The program for the public presentations (which were held on Friday, March 6, 2009), along with paper abstracts, can be found online at here. The overview summary describing what we were up to read:

This international working group considers the career of vernacular traditions under globalization. As cultural forms circulate ever more widely, recycled, restructured, and hybridized as they travel, regimes of value insist increasingly on point of origin. Since economic value is predicated upon scarcity, in a global framework cultural objects are marked—and marketed—as local. Form itself is fetishized as social interaction becomes attenuated. Rather than contesting the reification of culture into exchangeable goods, the resistance of impoverished groups and social movements increasingly takes shape as a struggle for control over the manner of commodification and the profits thereof. In the face of restructurings of value initiated by the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, free trade agreements, and transnational corporations, intellectual property rights become a key locus of contention between distributors and cultural producers. The public component of this year’s group meeting will explore form and value as both categories of action and tools of analysis. We hope that attendees will help us with the work of comparison and synthesis.

My own presentation considered the current reshaping of the system of scholarly communications in which folklorists and ethnologists circulate (and find expanded publics for) their work in an era of corporate enclosure, media consolidation, and library crises on the one hand and open source technologies and open access movements on the other. The participants were a great group. In addition to many wonderful students and faculty members from the OSU folklore program, the participants were: Sadhana Naithani (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), Lee Haring, City College, CUNY), Mbugua wa-Mungai (Kenyatta University, Nairobi), Galit Hasan-Rokem (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Candace Slater (University of California, Berkeley), Amy Shuman (The Ohio State University), Dorothy Noyes (The Ohio State University), Javier León (Indiana University), Diarmuid Ó Giolláin (University College Cork), and Charles L. Briggs (University of California, Berkeley).

Thanks to everyone who helped bring this great event into existence. Thanks especially to the OSU folklore students who brought great energy (and a great Saturday lunch) to the event.

Nov 22

Cultural Analysis and the Savage Minds OA Awards

The winners of the Savage Minds OA Anthropology Awards have just been announced in the run up to tomorrow night’s award’s ceremony in the SF Hilton Lobby at 6 pm. Cultural Analysis, a fine OA folklore journal on whose editorial board I serve has taken the runner up spot in an excellent field. The journal Anthropology Matters has won the first place spot. Learn about all the nominees on Savage Minds here and who the winners in all three categories are here. Congratulations to the winners and thanks to those who voted.

Nov 12

Catching up with FolkPub

The student editors and publishers in the Folklore and Ethnomusicology Publications Group (a.k.a. FolkPub) have been very busy in recent months. An enterprise of the graduate students in IU’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, FolkPub is the publisher of the venerable journal Folklore Forum and of books under the Trickster Press imprint. Much of their work has been migrating online in recent days and I wanted to note some highlights.

Current articles and reviews–in open full-text– in Folklore Forum are appearing at a new website: http://folkloreforum.net/ . The new site offers an RSS feed, so you can easily keep up with new content in a feed reader. Earlier this year, the new site and format debuted with an issue on folklore studies in East Asia in honor of Roger L. Janelli. In recent days, several new reviews have been added to the site and new contributions are expected on a continuing basis. Several special issues are in the works.

The entire back run of Folklore Forum back to its beginnings in 1968 have been made freely and fully available in the IUScholarWorks Repository service here at Indiana University. Find the whole collection, in searchable form here.

Work on the book side continues as well. At the recent American Folklore Society meetings, the FolkPub crew were an active presence, selling backlist titles and unveilling both a new title and a new business model. They were proud to release a a new, enhanced edition of Sandra Dolby’s classic work Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative. This title returns to print re-typeset with a new preface by the author and a foreward by Richard Bauman. Unlike past Trickster Press titles, this work has been published using a Print-on-Demand approach which means that it can be offerred at modest cost, that it should be available forever and that the students will not need to worry about managing complex shipping and storage problems. Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative is available directly from Amazon.com here. Also available in this new format is Trickster Press’ best-selling textbook The Emergence of Folklore in Everyday Life: A Fieldguide and Sourcebook, edited by George H. Schoemaker. It too is now available via Amazon.com. Find it here.

Information on the entire Trickster Press backlist can be found on the Press’ website at: https://www.indiana.edu/~folkpub/trickster/

One Trickster Press book title has already joined Folklore Forum as an open access resource in IUScholarWorks Repository. The book The Old Traditional Way of Life: Essays in Honor of Warren E. Roberts edited by Robert E. Walls and George H. Schoemaker and published in 1989 can not be found in its entirity here. (Find its open worldcat record here.)

Congratulations to the current FolkPub staff on all this good work. Well-wishes go as well to FolkPub staff who served in recent years. Their efforts provided a significant foundation for present accomplishments.

Nov 3

CFP: Public and Private

From a press release from the conference organizers:

IU/OSU Joint Student Conference call for papers:

We are happy to announce the 2008-2009 collaborative conference between the Indiana University Folklore & Ethnomusicology Student Associations and The Ohio State University Folklore Student Association. 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, as it relates to the study of academic and vernacular interpretation of everyday life.

“Public and Private”

Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
March 27-28, 2009

This year’s conference seeks to explore the following questions:

(1) How do we negotiate notions of public and private in our work?
(2) What are we learning, and what can we teach others, about this seeming dichotomy?
(3) How might we think beyond sectors and consider public and private in light of our
fieldwork, field notes, presentations, and as emerging in our research of expressive forms?

We are seeking papers and posters that engage the following topics as they relate to the theme of “Public and Private”:

Identities
Sectors
Spaces
Boundaries
Traditions
Histories
Memories
Narratives
Performances

We also welcome submissions of papers and posters on other topics.

The conference will have three opportunities for participation: paper presentations, poster sessions, and a discussion forum for all attendees. We will be accepting 250-word abstracts for 15-minute papers and poster presentations. We highly encourage poster submissions, particularly for research projects in progress, as there will be opportunities for active dialogue. Abstracts must be submitted by February 1, 2008. Please email submissions to iu.osu.conf@gmail.com. Please see the IU FSA website for details on submissions: www.indiana.edu/~folksa.

The discussion forum will allow all attendees to engage with enduring issues in our fields and to consider how those issues have emerged in their own research. Conference attendees are encouraged to submit three issues that have emerged in their own research for inclusion in developing this forum. Come join this important conversation. Remember, together we are shaping the future of our fields!

For more information on the details of the conference (lodging, location, etc.) visit
www.iub.edu/~folksa in the coming months.

Please register for the conference by February 28, 2008!

May 19

Translation / Transformation Conference

Congratulations to the student organizers who hosted the Translation/Transformation conference last Friday and Saturday (May 16-17) at The Ohio State University. This was a conference organized by the Folklore Student Association at OSU and the Folklore and Ethnomusicology students from Indiana University. It was a wonderful, lively, productive graduate student conference in which faculty from the two programs were asked to serve as panel discussants. The student papers, from those delivered by undergraduates to those offered by seasoned dissertation writers, were uniformly excellent and the OSU students, as local hosts, really rolled out the red carpet for everyone participating. It was a wonderful event, with plenty of time for fruitful discussion and social networking. The faculty participants, including myself, seemed uniformly pleased with, and impressed by, the overall effort. The student organizers clearly worked very hard to make the event a success. Until the link goes away, the conference program can be found online here.

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