All, or almost all of the ACLS Scholarly Societies are in mutual aid relationships with university-based scholarly publishers (=university presses). In the case of folklore studies and the American Folklore Society (AFS), the most obviously relevant of these presses are (1) University of Illinois Press (which publishes the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) on behalf of AFS), (2) Indiana University Press (based at Indiana University Bloomington, where AFS is also based), (3) University Presses of Mississippi, (4) Wayne State University Press, (5) University of Wisconsin Press, and (6) Utah State University Press (now an imprint of the University Press of Colorado). Numerous other university presses in the United States are important to folklorists for various (often, but not only, area studies) reasons, but these six are particularly impactful through their (strong, specifically) folklore studies lists. They are also, like their peer presses strong in other fields, always working to innovate and take advantage of new affordances arising in our own time. Like our societies, they are not perfect but they are invaluable.
I have had a lot to say previously about university presses and scholarly communications more generally. Beyond talk, I have tried to do what I can. where I can to help. Here I just want to record again that university presses are themselves a crucial part of the ecosystems within which scholarly societies work generally, and in which folklorists and the AFS works, specifically. There are many threads woven together here and I will not unravel them at this point. Key at present is that those six presses of special concern to AFS members (call them the six most likely to send editors and books to the AFS meetings year after year) are all based at public universities. Things are more and more challenging at public universities like the ones that host these presses, especially anything seen from above to be part and parcel of the humanities, the social sciences, or the liberal arts tradition generally. The contexts in which the presses and some of us as individuals work are getting more difficult and administrators in varied locations are less and less willing to listen and learn learn about the important ways that university presses serve the universities that host them as part of a larger ecology of actors advancing research, teaching and service in the public interest.
So, when we do environmental scans of the state of our field, or when we pursue such things as a so-called SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), we must keep the state of “our” university presses in mind. They have done, and are doing, important work with and for folklorists every day. In doing that work, they are also helping students and the various local audiences, publics, communities, and and collaborators with whom we engage. Given that all of the nodes in our network are experiencing new stresses, it is important that none of us in that network take any other node for granted. We must keep a lot of different things in view, including university press publishing.
My run of posts on scholarly societies in general, and my scholarly societies in particular, has, I know, been heavy on facing unhappy developments and low, so far, on positive prospects. Here is a post to where I highlight what is for me a welcome trend.
I live and work in a community that still centers a really rich and generative and extended form of in-person graduate education, but my colleagues and I have long been confronted by the question of how to support those who cannot take up the project of moving across the United States, or the globe, to join us in the multi-year study of folklore (or, in my other field and department, anthropology). This question predated the internet. It predated Zoom, YouTube, and similar platforms. It once took the form of letters seeking reading recommendations and these still come to us by email. In my former department, the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, we then still ran a paper- and postage-based correspondence course in folklore studies when I arrived on the faculty in 2000. The old summer institute-based form of the Folklore Institute associated with Indiana University and the leadership of Stith Thompson (1885-1976)—like it’s still thriving peer, the Linguistic Institutes run by the Linguistic Society of America since 1928—was another analog solution to the problem of low residency, high impact, advanced study in folkloristics. For the bestowal of a full and formal master’s degree, the Master of Arts in Cultural Sustainability (M.A.C.S.) today offered by folklorists and allies at Goucher College is a now proven low-residency option. I commend all of those, past and present, who have worked to build up the Goucher program. They identified, and have found ways to meet, an obvious need.
To my fellow folklorists, I say that we need more experiments and more approaches to the problem of higher-level, but still introductory, educational opportunities in folklore studies. It is in this context that I have been inspired by some specific developments that I wish to flag. For those who are not yet aware of them, I point here to some in-person and online initiatives that have broader implications. If you can get access to the Chronicle of Higher Education, I direct your attention to a survey article: “Making Space for the Humanities Off Campus: Night School Bar and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research offer alternatives to traditional academe.” by Ariannah Kubli (2024). Finish out your introduction, if you can, by consulting an older (but still post-COVID) account of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR) in the New York Times: “Where Can You Go to Grad School Without Going to Grad School?” by Cat Zhang (2023).
Given the number of folklorists in New York City and the lack of folklore courses there, it would be easy and fruitful to imagine a sophisticated folklore studies course in-person at the BISR, but pitching such a direct thing is not my point here. What I am trying to evoke is the idea that we can find win-win ways to give more adults access to sophisticated learning in folklore studies outside the extant US/North American/world graduate programs.
While the articles cited above evoke the convivial nature of in person, non-degree adult education, it is important to highlight here that many of the BISR courses (to stick with a flagship example) are taught online and are thus available to those who cannot physically get to Brooklyn, New York. I urge the curious to check out the current BISR course offerings not because I am urging you to take one of their courses, but because I am hoping that you will give thought to the possibilities. It is within the capacity of, I believe, organizations such as the American Folklore Society to organize and platform such a thing as a four-week (twelve-contact hour) introduction to folklore studies. Who might take such a course? Probably a mixed group with diverse purposes, but one audience that I hope would take such a course would be those colleagues who have entered the realm of public folklore practice without having a background in folklore studies. Such colleagues increasingly staff folk and traditional arts programs in state-level arts and humanities agencies and thus are our colleagues, but they are colleagues who sometimes struggle to join in the discussions that we have had been advancing since 1888 or earlier. Another potential audience might be those pondering whether formal graduate training in folklore studies is actually what they want.
Of course, the examples of Night School Bar and the BISR are just variations on older practices, including a wide range of proven community education frameworks that we can be revisiting and perhaps revising for present purposes. The first folklore studies course that I ever taught was a multi-session course for adults on “Jewish Folklore and Ethnology” shared in Tulsa, Oklahoma as part of the dryly named, but richly experienced, “Adult Institute” co-managed by Jewish community organizations in the city that I once lived in so intensively. I was too young and inexperienced when I did that, but I know of no harms caused and I met lifelong friends in the doing.
I will wrap this reflection up, but I note that trends in continuing and adult education are intersectional with the rise of microcredentials in general and the practical ability for organizations to issue semi-formal credentials on platforms like LinkedIn in particular. When I complete, for instance, university- required training on various regulations governing my work as a scholar, these completed trainings can now be sent to display on my LinkedIn page. We are now more than a decade into discussions of digital badges and a raft of related practices that are separate from the university degree and its associated transcript. There is a large literature on microcredentials and continuing education in various domains, and the issues are complex, but the shallow end of the pool is accessible to us and in the AFS, we have a strong, time-tested brand. We at least have opportunities, as always, to experiment with even one-time trials. In this, we have the recent experience of the such key recent projects as the Folk Arts Partnership Professional Development Institute, the Veterans Oral History Workshops, and the institutes held in connection with the China-US Folklore and ICH Project. All of these have been partnered and impactful programs in teaching and learning staged outside formal university educational contexts.
PS: To anyone who has reads this post with hope that it would offer a top ten list of ways to study folklore without going to graduate school, I am sorry that my colleagues are not yet in a place to answer the title question in that way. For a glimpse of how the field works in the United States, see Lloyd (2021). For a glimpse how folklorists write and think, consider reading any of the titles recognized with the Chicago Folklore Prize. And think about attending a American Folklore Society annual meeting.
This is an essay (or “essay”) mainly authored by Copilot, the LLM-based AI tool provisioned to me by Indiana University. Spelling and typographic errors made by JBJ have been silently corrected for the sake of readability.
Jason Baird Jackson (JBJ): Hello again. I would like to return to one specific matter discussed in my previous conversation with you. I will review the background and, if it is ok, we can make a fresh start on just this topic. I will be approaching it somewhat differently this time. I wish to produce an essay, with your (Copilot) help that lays out the major risks posed by LLM-based AI tools for the American Folklore Society, the US-based organization that supports professional folklorists and those communities that they in turn serve. In a moment, I will give you some parameters for this essay. Are you ready to help?
Copilot: Absolutely, I’m ready to help! Please go ahead and provide the parameters for the essay, and we’ll get started on crafting it together.
JBJ: I would like the essay to be between 800 and 1000 words. While I know that you are engineered to produce pro- and con- style treatments of many issues, including on AI as a topic, I would like you to support me in emphasizing the concerns that I have. I will note some of those for you after giving these parameters. Beyond the 800-1000 word length, I would like the essay to be written in the most sophisticated register that you are capable of. Put differently, understand your readers to be people with graduate degrees in general and well-trained in folklore studies specifically. Before I share my themes of concern, do these parameters make sense?
Copilot: Yes, your parameters make perfect sense. We’ll aim for an essay between 800 and 1000 words, focusing on the risks posed by LLM-based AI tools, written in a sophisticated register suitable for an audience of graduate-level professionals in folklore studies. Please go ahead and share your specific themes of concern, and we’ll incorporate those into the essay.
JBJ: Thank you. I know that space is limited, so here are the key concerns to weave in. I will number them (1-4).
(1) We will address the impact of the ways that LLM training data has been sourced, without consent, from writings produced by many individuals, but here including folklore studies scholars. Because folklorists have led around issues of open access, their exposure to enclosure in LLM training data is greater than it would have otherwise been. Those who lead the American Folklore Society and thereby help shape the future of the discipline need to understand these dynamics and to set policy related to them as well as to foster educational activities related to them.
(2) We will address the impact of the fact that folklorists have, in particular, entextualized and shared the words and knowledge of non-scholars of very diverse backgrounds living in many communities around the world. This has often been done in contexts in which we have said that we would not seek profit from, or allow others to profit from, their words. Cultural experts shared their words and lives with us but now their words and lives have been encoded into LLM training data without our knowledge and sometimes in ways that contradict what we promised our consultants. Those who lead the American Folklore Society and thereby help shape the future of the discipline need to understand these dynamics and to set policy related to them as well as to foster educational activities related to them.
(3) LLM and other AI tools are already fundamentally reshaping all of higher education, including the teaching of folklore studies (also known as folkloristics) by folklore scholars based in universities and colleges around the world. Those who lead the American Folklore Society and thereby help shape the future of the discipline need to understand these dynamics and to set policy related to them as well as to foster educational activities related to them.
(4) LLM and other AI tools are being adopted and put to use widely at present. This uptake is already transforming social life and having significant environmental and economic effects. Because folklorists are social scientists and humanists who study and intervene in the social world, it is crucial that they understand these environmental and economic effects and share their own work in relation to them. Those who lead the American Folklore Society and thereby help shape the future of the discipline need to understand these dynamics and to set policy related to them as well as to foster educational activities related to them.
With these four themes described, you can compute a response using your own LLM models.
Copilot: Great, thank you for outlining these key concerns. Let’s begin crafting the essay. Here’s a draft that incorporates your themes:
The Risks Posed by LLM-Based AI Tools: A Call to Action for the American Folklore Society
The advent of large language model (LLM) based AI tools has ushered in a new era of technological advancement, promising unprecedented capabilities in data processing and information dissemination. However, these tools also pose significant risks, particularly to disciplines such as folklore studies. As members of the American Folklore Society (AFS), it is imperative that we critically examine these risks and develop strategies to mitigate them. This essay outlines four major concerns that demand our immediate attention and action.
1. Unconsented Use of Scholarly Work
One of the most pressing issues is the manner in which LLM training data has been sourced. Many LLMs have been trained on vast datasets that include writings produced by individuals without their consent. This includes the work of folklore studies scholars, whose contributions to open access initiatives have inadvertently increased their exposure to such data enclosure. The ethos of open access, championed by many folklorists, has been exploited, leading to the unauthorized use of their intellectual property. The AFS must recognize these dynamics and advocate for policies that protect the rights of scholars, ensuring that their work is not co-opted without permission.
2. Exploitation of Cultural Knowledge
Folklorists have long been dedicated to documenting and sharing the knowledge of diverse communities around the world. This often involves entextualizing the words and experiences of non-scholars, with a commitment to ethical practices that respect the source communities. However, the integration of this cultural knowledge into LLM training data, often without the knowledge or consent of the communities involved, represents a profound breach of trust. Many folklorists have assured their consultants that their contributions would not be used for profit, yet these assurances are undermined by the current practices of AI developers. The AFS must address this issue by setting stringent policies and fostering educational initiatives that emphasize the ethical implications of AI use in folklore studies.
3. Transformation of Higher Education
The impact of LLM and other AI tools on higher education is already being felt, with significant implications for the teaching of folklore studies. These technologies are reshaping pedagogical approaches, research methodologies, and the overall academic landscape. Folklore scholars must navigate this rapidly changing environment, balancing the potential benefits of AI tools with the need to maintain the integrity of their discipline. The AFS has a crucial role to play in guiding this transition, developing policies that support the responsible integration of AI in academia, and providing resources to help educators adapt to these new challenges.
4. Broader Societal Impacts
Beyond the confines of academia, the widespread adoption of LLM and other AI tools is transforming social life, with significant environmental and economic effects. As social scientists and humanists, folklorists are uniquely positioned to study and intervene in these transformations. The environmental costs of AI, including the substantial energy consumption required for training and operating LLMs, are a growing concern. Additionally, the economic implications, such as job displacement and the creation of new forms of labor, must be critically examined. The AFS should lead efforts to understand these impacts, encouraging research that explores the intersection of AI, society, and the environment, and advocating for policies that promote sustainable and equitable technological development.
Conclusion
The risks posed by LLM-based AI tools are multifaceted and complex, demanding a proactive and informed response from the American Folklore Society. By addressing the unconsented use of scholarly work, the exploitation of cultural knowledge, the transformation of higher education, and the broader societal impacts, the AFS can help shape a future where AI technologies are used ethically and responsibly. It is incumbent upon us, as stewards of cultural heritage and advocates for ethical scholarship, to lead this charge and ensure that the values of our discipline are upheld in the face of technological change.
Please review this draft and let me know if there are any adjustments or additional points you’d like to include.
JBJ: I have only one request. In section “4. Broader Societal Impacts” you evoke, as expected, “substantial energy consumption”. Could you add language related to the environmental issue of water consumption in AI computing? It is acceptable for this addition to make the essay slightly longer.
Copilot: Certainly! Here is the revised section with the addition regarding water consumption:
4. Broader Societal Impacts
Beyond the confines of academia, the widespread adoption of LLM and other AI tools is transforming social life, with significant environmental and economic effects. As social scientists and humanists, folklorists are uniquely positioned to study and intervene in these transformations. The environmental costs of AI are substantial, including the significant energy consumption required for training and operating LLMs. Additionally, the water consumption associated with cooling data centers is a critical issue, as it places further strain on already limited water resources. These environmental impacts necessitate a thorough examination and responsible management. Furthermore, the economic implications, such as job displacement and the creation of new forms of labor, must be critically examined. The AFS should lead efforts to understand these impacts, encouraging research that explores the intersection of AI, society, and the environment, and advocating for policies that promote sustainable and equitable technological development.
Please review this updated draft and let me know if there are any further adjustments or additional points you’d like to include.
JBJ: Thank you. May I have your permission to share this with text readers, citing you (Copilot) as the co-author?
Copilot: I’m glad you found the essay helpful! You are welcome to share the essay with your readers. While I don’t require formal citation, you can certainly mention that you used Microsoft Copilot to assist in crafting the essay. If you need any further assistance or revisions, feel free to ask!
JBJ: Thank you!
Copilot: You’re very welcome! If you need any more assistance in the future, feel free to reach out. Good luck with your essay!
A Note to Human Readers
Thank you for your patience with me (JBJ) in this, my most recent experiment with LLM-based AI. You should know that I engage in such experiments sparingly because on the one hand, I really do not wish to be doing this and, on the other hand, I really feel the need to understand these tools, which have already dramatically changed my job and the lives of all of those around me and in my own egocentric and sociocentric networks.
Hopefully readers will realize that what I would say unassisted by co-pilot would be different. Co-pilot is not human and therefore co-pilot does not actually believe anything, but reading the text that Co-pilot strung together one work prediction at a time might suggest that co-pilot has opinions. If Co-pilot had the opinions expressed/suggested, then Co-pilot and I would agree on some points and disagree on others. Where we agree, it is because the system is drawing upon my prompts and trying to give me what I am asking for. Where we disagree it is because the system is drawing upon its own predictive algorithms and training data to produce what it thinks is the statistically most likely statements. An example early in Co-pilot’s text is “promising.” I certainly would not, on my own, say promising. But take note: the training data and algorithms “know” us and such systems are getting more sophisticated in reflecting what we know all the time. That is part of the point here. If you need an example of this, search for the phrase “source community” in section 2. This is not everyday English. This is a term of art specific to museum anthropology and museum-focused folklore studies. It has only been in active disciplinary use since the publication in 2003 of Laura Peers and Alison Brown’s edited book Museums and Source Communities.
Before publishing this AI-dependent post, I donated to the Native American Rights Fund, which supports federally recognized Native American nations in the US in defending water and water rights. I invite you to learn more about NARF and its water work here: https://narf.org/cases/tribal-water-institute
Unbury the Lede: Here I reflect on the ways that the crises of the current moment make the older Whac-A-Mole problem something more and more risky for scholarly societies and those they serve. No moles are harmed in this post.
Wikipedia has a solid entry on Whac-A-Mole and how the arcade game became a colloquial expression “to refer to a situation characterized by a series of futile, Sisyphean tasks, where the successful completion of one just yields another popping up elsewhere.” Almost everyone I know lives, at times at least, in this Whac-A-Mole state of being. I do not propose to diagnose or assess that. In a more focused way, I want to reflect on the ways that elected leaders and professional staff in scholarly societies are today particularly stressed by Whac-A-Mole dynamics and evoke the consequences in the particular time and place that we are in (at least in my neighborhood of the North American scholarly, public humanities, and applied social science world). As in the previous two posts, my frame of reference is primarily the American Folklore Society (AFS), secondarily the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and tertiarily all of the scholarly societies of the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS). These levels relate to my degree of direct experience, with my knowledge of scholarly societies in general being informed most heavily by the situation of the AFS.
I do not want to suggest that society leaders never faced the Whac-A-Mole dynamic in the past. Surely, they did. I do not want to suggest that others in the world or in academia, the public humanities, and the applied social sciences do not also face real challenges of the sort that I am evoking. Clearly, they do. But the focus of these reflections are the societies that I know, the AFS in particular. Some of what I reflect upon here is, I think, more generally applicable.
What scholarly society leaders—lay and professional alike—generally wish to do is to have a sound strategic plan and to work it. Even in good times, this is a challenge. There is always too much to do, and resources are almost always scarce. Money is the resource that gets discussed most often, but time and attention may be the most valuable resources of all. Whether a work week is forty hours or fifty hours or more hours, there are only so many hours to devote to the work. Elected (and appointed) leaders have “day jobs” (usually quite demanding ones) and can only devote a part of their work effort to the governance, or just basic service, tasks associated with their professional society. If a scholarly society is large and organized enough to have a professional staff (as both AFS and AAA do), the staff members will have many day-to-day duties to fulfill. Even if no unexpected problems were to ever arise, they would face challenging decisions related to the balance of work between tending to immediate tasks relative to advancing longer term goals arrived at in discussion between the elected leadership and the Executive Director. Sorting this out is a basic aspect of everyday leadership.
But in practice, matters are usually still harder than this. And I argue that they are harder today (much harder today) than they were fourteen years ago when I was elected to the AFS Executive Board or nineteen years ago when I was (as editor) an ex-officio member of the Council for Museum Anthropology Board (and thereby attending with special focus on AAA governance issues). Whac-A-Mole is the vernacular expression for the problem that is now, I believe, severe.
As a matter of planning, how much time should a paid or elected society leader set aside each week to deal with unexpected, but inescapable, problems that will arise unlooked for? How does a professional or elected society leader do triage in real-time when the day-today and longer-term-work still needs to be done, but the unexpected problems keep popping up? And what about when those pop-up problems are less “regular” and more existential? Even the conscious choice not to deal with a pop-up challenge can, and often is, time and attention consuming. And choosing not to tackle a pop-up challenge, while perhaps justified in context or on principle, can often generate still more pop-up challenges.
This dynamic has some reoccurring elements that can be isolated and described. Even in non-dumpster fire times, there is the problem of asymmetry. Membership organizations are comprised of numerous members and a small number of elected leaders and usually a still smaller group of professional staff. At any one time, there is only one Executive Director and only one elected President. This is an inherent design feature of these organizations, and I would certainly not wish to change this, but it means that many voices can be (and usually are) trying to be heard by a very small number of ears. Devoted to serving the membership that has entrusted them with leadership roles, society Presidents and Executive Directors are going to do everything they can do to respond to all who seek to engage with them, but as most professionals in my world experience, email (for instance) is also asymmetric. It is very easy to send a question or to state a demand or to make a suggestion via email, but it is almost always a bigger task for the recipient to reply and an even bigger task to do what the email sender wants or to address substantively the concern or suggestion being raised. As many of my colleagues who worked before and after widespread email can report, email is, in part, a means by which strangers (and friends) have direct access with which to write things on someone’s to do list. Some among us can ignore (or have no other choice, given time limits, but to ignore) email (and other communications channels), but a society President or Executive Director really cannot do this. Writing a letter on a typewriter and mailing it was once a laborious barrier to entry in this communicative economy, but despite efforts such as the slow email movement, expectations for immediate replies and easy communication, have intensified the Whac-A-Mole problem considerably.
That was true without dumpster fires (another contemporary idiom explained by Wikipedia), but now we are living in a time of near constant, and usually overlapping, crises and are doing so in crisis-saturated social environments. A scholarly society (AFS for instance) might set a strategic goal of working with members to establish new graduate programs in its field. In an AFS context, this is a perfectly reasonable goal to consider pursuing. I know individuals in folklore studies who would like to do just this thing and who work in contexts in which such an endeavor is reasonable and do-able. But in the world of Whac-A-Mole and of interconnected and endemic crises, there can be a difficult calculus. If a particular already extant graduate program in a field is in trouble and members (understandably) call upon their scholarly society to help make the case to, for instance, local university administrators, that is pressing work, and it very well may displace giving attention to the project of supporting the creation of new graduate programs. And under conditions in which crises are arising constantly and society members are expecting their society to respond, constantly, strategic goals—even strategical goals aimed at preventing crises from arising in the first place—can be forced, by the unfolding of human events in real-time, to the back-burner.
Even if everyone—all members of a society, for instance—had abundant knowledge and clear insights into the state of various matters, and of the world as a whole, this dynamic would be hard, but it is harder still because such perfect knowledge is not how things are. Different people know, or think that they know, different things. And regardless of what they know and don’t know and think that they know, they have different priorities. An Executive Board, for instance, can assess and rank priorities, but some possible goals can be simply incompatible with other goals. And very few Executive Boards devote time (or have time to devote) to setting general priorities for addressing specific crises that emerge unlooked for. What tends to happen in most organizations, is that leaders fall back on what they understand to be shared values and historical precedents for dealing improvisationally with emergent challenges in their field.
(For an example that is actually unfolding now…) If a AAA member is understood by a significant number of AAA members to being treated unfairly by their home institution, the general value of supporting members and the historical lessons of earlier instances of AAA interventions in support of other AAA members under threat kicks in. I am not saying that it should not be thus. What I am flagging is the general problem that some elected leaders of a scholarly society and some professional staff of a society in this situation will wind up devoting time to the emergent problem and in doing do, other work will be hindered. Pursuit of strategic goals are part of what gets hindered in the world of Whac-A-Mole.
The basic problem relates to the fact that almost no organizations in which we work and few individuals working within them, budget “slack time” for addressing unexpected crises. I see this in my own College at my own University in which my Executive Dean is working almost around the clock to address profound structural problems, but each day he is handed a raft of pop-up problems, the addressing of which is unavoidable but the addressing of which will not solve or ameliorate the structural problems that are on his agenda. I have writing group colleagues who set aside a few hours each week for pop-up problems, but the pop-up problems of an individual faculty member and those of a whole scholarly society and field (or College) are of a different order of magnitude.
Returning to the different priorities of individual members and constituent groups within societies, they can not only have different priorities and hopes and needs, but they can also have different levels of expectations of both norms and of service. For instance, one of the hardest problems for societies right now is that senior members often expect the maintenance of, or enhancement of, both quality and coverage of services and activities. (Doing fewer things, doing things less well, etc. is a choice that very few individuals are willing to openly endorse, but older members (a group I am in) especially bring “historical perspective” to the matter.) Senior members also often expect—as experienced members who have served their societies in various ways over extended periods—to have gained from this (1) direct and regular access to current leaders and (2) that their expectations for what the society is attending to will be given due weight. This would just be a familiar social dynamic under less crisis-filled conditions, but it makes hard problems harder under present ones, when demands for change, demands for stasis, and vigorous demands for active responses to crises—some contradictory, irresolvable, or lose-lose in character—are constantly being called for. This is just one more part of the Whac-A-Mole calculus. One could offer a companion analysis of the parallel special demands of younger members and the ways that they get expressed through other channels. Similarly, the contribution of an ever-changing digital social media landscape to Whac-A-Mole could be discussed. The problem comes from all sides through many channels.
Will Whac-A-Mole get worse? I cannot see how it will not get worse, at least in the short term. If one society member is being subjected to a doxing campaign today (a real example on my mind today), chances are pretty good that two or three will be so threatened sometime soon. While such new, sometimes completely unprecedented, crises emerge and have to be addressed by society professional staff and elected leaders, the endless stream of less dramatic but still insistent emails and text messages will also continue. Society leaders don’t stop fielding calls for more online meetings and fewer online meetings, the restoration of print conference programs and the elimination of print conference programs, the restoration of more rigorous screening practices for conference participation and the lowering of barriers to entry to the conference program, etc. In such circumstances, my response has been to try to cultivate empathy for those who take up the work of scholarly societies, even when they are pursuing policies that I do not favor, or not taking up the tasks and challenges that I would myself prioritize as urgent. We are contemplating the lives and work of human beings who are trying, usually trying their best, to serve others.
Empathy can help, but it is also not enough to get societies through the multiple and intersectional crises that they and the fields that they serve are now facing. Members have, I think, to more actively give society leaders a break and grant them some time (which means perhaps letting some things slip for a while) to sort out and prioritize not just strategic goals and tactical plans, but also to sort out day-to-day workflows and—this is most difficult—the mission and values-based frameworks by which (and this hurts) they will decide on our behalf what not to do and not just what they will (with us as members) do. As my posts on the potential banning of public funds for scholarly societies and on the impacts of forced change in general education were trying to suggest, giving society leaders some space to learn about emerging risks is one of the things that we collectively can be doing. The way that we would do this would include individually learning more about what our societies (and fields) and their leaders are up against and, also, engaging in a bit of triage ourselves. Do I need to send this email? If I need to send it, do I need a reply and if I do not need a reply, can I tell my recipient this and then not feel bad if they take me up on my offer of not replying? You get the idea.
One key role placed by scholarly societies is to monitor the health of a field on a local, national and international level. Knowing what the state of affairs is, is a prelude to formulating field-wide programs or targeted interventions aimed at addressing local or systemic problems. While I will not stress it here, a joy-rich upside of keeping up with a discipline from a society perspective is that society leaders learn not just about problems but also about successes and victories worth celebrating and hopefully emulating. But here my focus, unfortunately, is on the problems and not the many accomplishments one might consider. Building on my previous post, here I am again considering the national situation in general (in the USA) as it relates to the work of the American Folklore Society (AFS), my primary disciplinary home, and the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in which I am also active, including as a board member of the Council for Museum Anthropology, a AAA section.
I urge readers of this post to read the IHE story and then to begin exploring other reporting on the impacts of SB 266. Read the legislation itself and study the situation. Here, I note that Florida education leaders had already removed a statewide introductory sociology course Principles of Sociology from all general education offerings and “declared the discipline inherently liberal (Moody 2024).” (See also Hartocollis 2024). My concern here is general, but this is also personal, as general education sociology courses that I took at the University of Florida and what is today Palm Beach State College (then Palm Beach Community College) were the stepping stones that I took to becoming a BA sociology major. Being a sociology major (and anthropology minor) student in turn was the basis on which I sought and earned master’s degrees in folklore and anthropology and ultimately my PhD and my life and career. I use what I learned in those general education sociology courses every day. I am who I am because of them.
What Inside Higher Education has called “A Battle Over Florida’s General Education Courses” has reached a new stage, as reported on yesterday (10/3/2024=Moody 2024). Public universities in Florida, the state where I was born, raised, and educated (University of Florida ’90) are grappling with [Florida] Senate Bill 266, a far-reaching law that is now central to the transformation of public higher education in Florida. I will not unpack all aspects of it, but key to what I am evoking here are the ways that the legislation constrains and controls general education courses. As reported by IHE:
Florida International University’s Board of Trustees voted last week to drop 22 courses from the core curriculum, including Anthropology of Race & Ethnicity, Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies, and Sociology of Gender. The move follows last year’s passage of SB 266, a sweeping higher ed bill that, among other things, limits the scope of general education courses permitted at public universities.
Removing Principles of Sociology was a foretaste of the larger situation now. Because legislators and system leaders have construed large swaths of the humanities and social sciences to be inherently political and thus biased, these courses are moved out of eligibility for general education credit. Those who work in colleges and universities know the ways that such shifts will ramify (/are already ramifying). General education courses serve whole campuses. Some undergraduate students gain basic knowledge of disciplines through them and then move on to other majors and minors and interests. That is as it should be. But some students, as I did, come to find their home and stick with the fields that they first meet through the fulfilling of general education requirements. A general education course becomes a discipline and perhaps also the basis for a career. No humanities or social science department wants to, or expects to, see every general education student become a minor or major student, but they usually find that some do do this. General education impacts the lives of every general education student and general education courses also help students find what they are most passionate about and most interested in. There is a kind of triangular shaped demographic pattern present here. At the top, a relatively small number of students will follow me, and those like me, all the way up the ladder from a general education course to a doctorate and a place in the research university or research museum (etc.), but there are layers all the way from the relatively large auditoriums in which my colleagues and I teach general education courses to this small peak. Many students begin in such courses and climb further up and make meaningful lives and careers for themselves on the basis of BA/BS majors, BA/BS minors, and MA/MS degrees. A system that has been tweaked and adjusted based on shared governance principles at the department and campus and institutional level for decades is now being thrown completely out of whack. By forces above and beyond these levels. The consequences of politicizing general education are great.
From the perspective of disciplines and the scholarly societies that serve them, the new approaches to the politicization of general education are another existential threat. Fields like sociology, anthropology, and folklore studies have no choice but to understand, and seek to address, what is happening and what is likely to happen. Such fields are viable, in part, in universities because of their contribution to general education. Those currently experiencing the transformation of higher education beyond Florida have already seen the ways that approaches being pioneered in Florida (or Texas or North Carolina, or…) are being transferred to other states. This is not just emulation but is a matter of common tactics being formulated and promulgated to the states by national advocacy organizations.
What is my takeaway here? My purpose in this post (and the previous one) was to raise these issues relative to scholarly societies. Scholarly societies do not possess the kinds of resources that national think tanks, bill mills, and political parties possess, but these matters are fundamental to the very existence of, and future of, scholarly fields and the scholarly societies that support them. To be perfectly clear, folklore studies, as an academic discipline in the United States, would not survive the removal of folklore studies courses from undergraduate curriculum in the states where our field lives inside public colleges and universities. If what is happening now in Florida reaches its intended conclusion there and if it is repeated elsewhere, there will be, to use a new metaphor, an extinction event.
This is hard. It is hard if you teach courses now being targeted. It is hard if you are a department or program chair. It is hard if you are faculty leader on an impacted campus in an impacted state system. It is hard if you are a faculty leader on such a campus in such a system. It is hard too if you are a student who wants to take an impacted course, for whatever good reason, and it is being pulled away from you in a context in which there is already ever more pressure for students to not explore but to instead knuckle-down and speed into the “talent pipeline” that awaits outside the graduation ceremony.
Facing such things is not what motivates teachers to teach or elected leaders to try to serve their scholarly societies, but there is really no choice. It is another situation like that attributed to Rabbi Tafron, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” None of us will fix, or see an end to, the systemic and intersectional problems that we presently face, but if those who can do something don’t try to do something, whatever is to come will surely be worse. For fields, like folklore studies, that serve broad publics, these matters are not just academic, they ramify and impact those communities that we serve and all of those diverse populations, left and right, up and down, that we support and partner with close to the grass roots.
Unburying the lede: This post is about efforts to sever the financial, and therefore mutual aid, links presently connecting scholarly societies and universities (etc.). It is thus about an existential threat to both scholarly societies and those institutions and publics that they serve.
I grew up on the coasts of Florida which means I grew up with hurricanes. When a hurricane has made landfall in your coastal city, it is too late to bother with raising the warning flags.
To sustain the scholars and practitioners, and broader publics, that they serve, scholarly societies in the humanities and the social sciences have no choice but to focus on emerging storms on, and beyond, the horizon as well as to take account of changing weather and climate patterns that might be making storms more frequent, more powerful, and potentially more destructive. While ensuring that things go well on a day-to-day basis, during sunny and partly cloudy days, scholarly society leaders need to also focus on identifying and preparing for the storms that are likely to come. Societies that are aware of, and that have been prepared for them, are better positioned to weather what comes. If we set aside the weather metaphor, in some cases, societies may be able to mobilize and prevent, and not just prepare for, the threats they face.
In dialogue with colleagues, I have been trying to enumerate some of the challenges that seem to threaten scholarly societies based in the United States. While the American Folklore Society (AFS) is foremost on my mind in this context, I am a presently a board member of the Council for Museum Anthropology, a constituent section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and thus I have AAA on my mind also.
Scholarly societies, such as those that (like AFS and AAA) are members of the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS), are in close relationship with college and universities, as well as with other institutional settings in which academics, public humanists, and applied social scientists work. These other settings include museums, archives, public folklore agencies, federal, state, and local government agencies, NGOs, and other kinds of public-interest organizations. Most obviously, scholarly societies provide manifold opportunities to their members and these opportunities benefit those individuals who work in these organizations. They thus benefit the organizations in which we work and those we serve. Some obvious examples include providing venues for research exchange, professional development activities, disciplinary and interdisciplinary networking, scholarly publication venues, and basic infrastructure for healthy disciplinary work. I am capturing just a fraction of the benefits that scholarly societies provide to their members and to the fields and workplaces in which they serve. I know any readers that I find here know these things.
Scholarly societies rely upon their members in manifold ways, of course, but they also depend on the organizations that those members work in, and serve. Here, I will identify just a four of the most obvious points of reliance and connectivity.
Scholarly societies are publishers and key purchasers of those publications are the libraries maintained by universities and other institutions. Institutional funds thus support publications while publications in turn support students, faculty, curators, etc. within these institutions. This relationship has long been central to the work of scholarly communications. Societies need library subscribers and libraries serve their constituents through these subscriptions (or through institutional participation in open access alternatives).
In numerous but (I know, I know) not all contexts, institutions subsidize staff or student participation in scholarly society conferences. This can take various forms, including such things as internal student travel grants for graduate students or full or partial travel funds allotted to university faculty members or institutional staff members (as at museums). The bottom line is that some attendees at an AFS meeting have been partially or perhaps fully supported in their attendance. Usually, such subsidies are tied to the individual presenting new research at the meeting or participating actively in some other fashion on the program of the meeting. Such individuals often need to report on their participation to their colleagues afterwards to help further spread the benefits of this investment.
In some settings, those employed by in-field institutions will have their scholarly society membership paid for with research funds or other funding made available to the faculty member or other relevant staff members. I am well-aware of the variation existing on this point and I know that a society such as AFS has numerous members who lack access to such support, but as a matter of fact, such support exists. It is valuable both to those who receive it and to the society as a whole. Just as journal subscriptions help support journal publication and meeting subsidies support the production of a successful scholarly meeting (for everyone), dues subsidies contribute to the very existence of a scholarly society and make it possible for that organization to serve its membership, its field, and its publics. Whether paid for by employers or by members themselves, dues make scholarly infrastructure and scholarly connectivity possible.
Finally, scholarly societies are frequently hosted by specific institutions. This is not always so, but for smaller societies, this local hosting is often crucial. It can take two forms, both of which are relevant to AFS (and one of which [i.e. 4B] is quite relevant to AAA). (4A) A scholarly society’s home office can be based at a university or other institution. For instance, the AFS office is based at Indiana University Bloomington where it is affiliated with the College of Arts and Sciences and partnered with the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Such relationships are ideally durable across extended periods. To exist and endure, they always involve mutual benefit, with society resources advancing host institutional goals and, reciprocally, university (etc.) resources helping advance society ones. (4B) Shorter-term are instances when institutions host journal editorial offices. In this mode, one (perhaps more than one) institution agrees to assist the work of one or more of its faculty members in “taking on” the work of editing or co-editing a society journal, usually for a handful of years. In this mode, for instance, George Mason University has contributed in important ways to “hosting” the editorial office for the Journal of American Folklore (JAF), the primary peer-reviewed publication of the AFS. The JAF editorial team is comprised of George Mason University and the university leadership there has seen the value in helping the local faculty succeed in their editorial work. (More generally, institutions can allow for, and encourage students, faculty, and staff to take on other service roles within scholarly societies.)
Why have I spent over 1000 words laying this out? Because the things that that I have just described, which have never been in rock solid shape or universally observed, are now fundamentally in question. I am not speaking of familiar “budget challenges” but of an newer and more fundamentally existential matter.
To understand that which to I refer, I direct readers the American Enterprise Institute’s report “Scholarly Associations Gone Wild: Stop Publicly Funding Scholarly Groups that Trade Academics for Advocacy” (Greene and Hess 2024a, 2024b). There has been surprising little coverage of this report in higher education circles but it is starting to be talked about and those presently leading scholarly societies in and beyond the humanities and social sciences have no choice, I think, but to consider it and related initiatives that will begin as think tank reports and that will likely manifest as state-level legislation.
Responding will not be so simple as, for instance, just stopping issuing statements that others deem political. It does not really work that way under present conditions. It may or may not be a good idea for scholarly societies to issue statements deemed political by their members or by others, but every scholarly society ultimately has a domain of expertise, whether that is Icelandic poetry, southern barbecue, or nuclear arms control. Every area of expertise is subject to being framed as political and yet every scholarly society has a fundamental obligation to leverage and share the expertise of its members for the public good. This emerging storm is riddled with lose-lose dynamics. To change metaphors from storms to software, these dynamics are a feature and not a bug. They are part of a larger contest for the future that is well underway. And they are connected closely to still wider problems that scholarly societies, and other nodes in our networks all face. These are old problems taking new and more vexing forms: questions of free speech and civic discourse; questions of purpose in both universities and public service organizations; the nature of facts, knowledge, and expertise. They unfold in a degraded, and degrading social, and also literal, environment—locally, nationally, and globally and the co-occur with other unprecedented problems from those being raised by artificial intelligence (LLMs have already been built on the writings of members of ACLS societies) to climate change (which is not only impacting members of ACLS societies but is also impacting the basic, collective work of all scholarly societies).
Scholarly society leaders now cannot lose sight of the need to cultivate joy in their members, to boost morale, and to celebrate the good work that those members, and their societies, do, day in and day out. But the work is getting harder and those charged to lead scholarly societies, both as staff and as elected leaders, really have to choice by to make sense of, and try to adapt to, a very complex and unhealthy institutional environment. The AFS, the AAA, and any other ACLS society would be diminished in massive ways if even some U.S. states adopted no-funds-for-scholarly-societies legislation.
The following are still photographs taken by Jason Baird Jackson in Dunn Meadow on the Indiana University Bloomington campus on Saturday, April 27, 2024 between 12:15 pm and 2:23 pm. In contrast to April 25, I arrived on the scene fearful but with some awareness of about what would take place on this day. I was grading papers on campus when the sounds of a low flying helicopter could be heard. As on the 25th, I believe that the more important documentation from this day is in the form of video recordings also made with my mobile phone. The following images are released under a CC0 (No Rights Reserved) license.The main video for this day, showing the Indiana State Police encounter with protestors is available here: https://youtu.be/O0Fx0u_pYj8
The following are still photographs taken by Jason Baird Jackson in Dunn Meadow on the Indiana University Bloomington campus on Thursday, April 25, 2024 between 12:15 pm and 5:50 pm. I arrived on the scene not in any way expecting what would take place on this day. I departed the scene to attend the Department of Anthropology End of Year Celebration at McCalla School. I believe that the more important documentation from this day is in the form of video recordings also made with my mobile phone. The following images are released under a CC0 (No Rights Reserved) license.The main video for this day, showing the Indiana State Police encounter with protestors is available here: https://youtu.be/wculT_nJDv0 .
Alternate title: How to give away $99,000 worth of articles.
Although it has become normalized in open access/scholarly publication reform discussions to speak in this way, it often seems laughable to use the phrase ‘business model” in the context of many open access projects. Business model implies more modeling and more business that are often found in these efforts. When the eye-rolling or chuckling stops, the business school talk does remind prompt us to try to figure out what we are doing and how we are doing it. This is good even for tiny projects held together (often happily) with just a bit of used string and some tape. (Thank goodness that we do not all want to become the next oversized thing.)
I write the following as founding editor of Museum Anthropology Review, an open access journal supporting scholarly and public-facing work in museum anthropology, museum-based folklore studies, and material culture studies. In an immediate context of painful collective disciplinary assessment, debate, and reflection (#hautalk) on scholarly communication work (and labor practices, and power, and hierarchy, and practices of discrimination, etc.) in the ethnographic disciplines, I thought it might be useful to be more explicit about labor and funding underpinning MAR). While the journal has a complex origin story and has changed alongside other changes (in my career, at Indiana University, in the fields that it serves, etc.), the so-called business model has remained pretty consistent, making this small task easier. It is not the business school way, but it may be easiest and most contextually relevant in MAR and disciplinary context to track labor and money using participant roles. It is hard to do this in a way that will not seem either self-promoting or defensive, but it has to be done. I have stressed throughout my wider engagements with open access that projects such as MAR need to try to be intentional in their experimental work and in reporting back to the field for collective benefit. The need for more of this is more pressing now than ever and I have been relatively silent on open access issues since finishing what I thought of as capstone activities in two pieces written with colleague-collaborators (Jackson and Anderson 2014; Walters et al. 2015 [for this project, see also here]).
Readers: The journal does have readers. I and others involved in the journal know this from digital statistics (like Google Analytics), citations to work published, and word of mouth. Accessing MAR requires internet access but does not cost readers anything. Everyone involved is pleased to know that the work is worth doing, so I say thank you to the readers who have spent their time and attention on MAR. (I invite you to sign up as a reader and get free tables of contents for MAR by email.)
Authors: The journal does have authors. Authors are not paid for their contributions to MAR, but they are also not charged author fees or article processing charges, as is common in some other kinds of open access projects. In MAR we have so-far published 33 peer-reviewed articles. Had the authors of those articles published them in Curator and paid to make them open via Wiley’s Online Open program, the total cost to authors would have been $2500 x 33 = $82,500. Author-pays open publication in Museum Anthropology would have cost $3000 x 33 = $99,000 (See Wiley-Journal-APCs-2018MAY24 (a spreadsheet) via https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/licensing-open-access/open-access/onlineopen.html, accessed June 16, 2018). Those of us in other MAR other roles wish, of course, that authors were more aware of these taken-for-granted things. Hopefully this post will help a bit. I am proud that the MAR community has been able to make publication happen for these authors and their readers without ability-to-pay being a factor shaping the publication process. I also thank journal’s authors for sharing their valuable work widely through publication in MAR.
Peer-Reviewers: The journal definitely has peer-reviewers. They are generous and thoughtful and they are essential. I thank them here for their contributions to MAR. MAR peer-reviewers are not paid for their contributions. This is the current scholarly publishing norm for journals. I track the debate on the ethics of this. We are in a bind. Peer-review is hard, important labor. My opposition to industrial scale commercial scholarly publishing is based in part on the relationship between free labor of some participants and the huge profits that these firms reap (sample rants here and here). If paying peer-reviewers were to become the norm, then small community-based journals such as MAR would not be able to do it and corporate run and co-published journals would have an even bigger slice of the scholarly publishing pie (the enclosure of anthropology was at issue here). It is a conundrum at the heart of scholarly communications reform. For now, know that MAR peer-reviewers are valued and unpaid. The cash/gift economy status of the other roles is probably relevant to their feelings about this. My hope is that one feels relatively less exploited about peer-reviewing for a journal that looks like the one that I am describing here.)
Editorial Board: As is normal, MAR has a valued editorial board. As is common, I have not turned to them for structural, business or governance issues as much as I might have. As in other journals, they often serve as a kind of meta- peer-reviewers. For instance, serving as a source of editorial advice when I need help figuring something out or as a source of recommendations for reviewers. Sometimes editorial board members are called upon to undertake peer-reviews themselves. As with all journals that I know (and this is relevant in the context of the current journal controversies in the ethnographic fields), they also lend their reputations to the journal as a project. This is not inherently bad and it has a function beyond the accumulation of symbolic capital. When a potential author considers making a submission to any journal, they can review the masthead and ask: “Does my work resonate with the work of some of the people identified here?” Editorial Board Members are not paid for their MAR service. I thank them for encouraging and supporting the journal and helping it go.
A special member of the editorial board during the initial years of MAR was Associate Editor Kimberly Christen. As reflected also in her important scholarship (example here) and her own large and innovative projects (example here), Kim was a key interlocutor for me on (then new) questions of open access, helping me make sense of the shifting terrain across which MAR would travel.
Editor: At the most, two people have worked in the editorial office. Quite often, one person works in the editorial office. If there is just one person, then that person has been me. MAR launched in 2007. The story of its birth and its transformation is a different story and I postpone telling it here. A large number of friends and colleagues have helped by occupying the roles that I have noted above and by offering a range of encouragements and words of appreciation. The duties that traditionally fall to an editor are the ones that I have pursued. In the MAR case, this also includes overseeing the journal’s reviews work (book, exhibitions, etc.). This is a smaller setup than is normal even in smaller journals, which typically have a book review editor and other separated roles. There is no doubt that a critic would say that this concatenation of roles represents a concentration of power. I hope that close independent analysis would suggest that no pronounced problems flowed from this fact. For better or worse, it was also a concentration of so-called “service” labor. Understanding the finances of the editorial office can help readers judge the risks and ethics.
The actual production of the journal is also done in the editorial office. Content does not get handed off to a publishing partner for formatting, metadata coding, assignment of DOI numbers, etc. That work happens in-house and it is the editor and (when existing) the editorial assistant that do that work. As described below, Indiana University has created an excellent open access publishing environment that makes this possible.
As I still do, I held a tenured professorship when MAR sprang up into existence. As reflected by my notes above (and the points remaining to be made below), no money comes into MAR and no money goes out of MAR. There is no direct financial benefit to me to work on MAR. I acknowledge that I am paid well by Indiana University in support of the range of teaching, research, and service activities in which I engage and that I am reviewed annually and in the context of promotion decisions. No pressure to stop doing MAR has ever arisen (although my colleagues may privately question my judgement vis-à-vis excess editorial activity) and no special reward for doing it has been provided. My departments are home to a lot of editorial activity and mine just conforms to this local norm. This is a longstanding tradition, with many journals previously edited in them (Museum Anthropology, International Journal of American Linguistics, American Ethnologist, etc.) and many founded in them (Ethnohistory, Anthropological Linguistics, Journal of Folklore Research, etc.). If I did not do work on MAR I would be working on other things and my salary would not, I think, be any different. [I am mindful of the luxuries of choice available to me in my position.) MAR keeps me connected to my scholarly community and has brought a huge range of valuable experiences and relationships into my life. But there is no money to follow. Before 2013, MAR had only a kind of informal social base. It was produced by me and my friends with help from the IUScholarWorks program at the Indiana University libraries (see below). After 2013, MAR became the journal of the the Mathers Museum of World Cultures (MMWC). This was a positive byproduct of my becoming the MMWC’s Director. When my Directorship ends, MAR will remain at the museum and will be the responsibility of its next Director to continue, expand, shrink, change, or shutter. (Note: If the journal were to end next month or next year or next decade, the robust preservation and continued public accessibility of its backfiles is one of the durable commitments that IU Libraries have made to the project. See IU ScholarWorks below).
Editorial Assistant: When I was help in the work of the Editorial Office, it was by a graduate student from the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology or Department of Anthropology at Indiana University holding an .5 FTE (half of fulltime) graduate assistantship. Whereas the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University specifically funded a .5 FTE graduate assistantship for the work of supporting my previous editorship (2005-2009) of Museum Anthropology (the journal of the Council for Museum of Anthropology), MAR was never directly supported in this way. During a year serving as a department chair (2009-2010), a graduate assistant was assigned to support me in my scholarly activities. Helping with MAR became this colleague’s key duty. Between becoming Director of the MMWC in 2013 and the end of Spring 2017, the primary duty of a graduate student similarly appointed has also been to help with the journal. During fall 2017 and spring 2018, the work of the MMWC Director’s Office graduate assistantship has broadened to other projects, but the incumbent did do some MAR work. When a graduate student was working primarily on the journal, they held the title Editorial Assistant and appeared thus on the MAR masthead.
When filled, this Editorial Assistant role was a 20 hour per week position held during the fall and spring semesters. Those holding it have had the same stipends as their classmates holding similar appointments in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. They also hold fee waivers that pay for a significant portion of their course work for the full year (including summer courses) and they have a university health insurance plan. I wish that all of the assistantships held by students in my home departments (Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Anthropology) were better paid and offered better benefits, but I am happy that those student colleagues who worked with me on MAR had as good of a deal as any of their classmates. They can speak for themselves, but I think that they appreciated the experiences that they had while working on the journal. The rich range of publishing opportunities provided to graduate students in my departments have, over time, made (what I perceive to be) a significant difference in the career outcomes of the graduate students with whom my faculty colleagues and I have thus worked.
The key thing to note here vis-à-vis broader debates in anthropology publishing right now is that MAR’s basic editorial office work (correspondence, copyediting, layout and formatting, social media stuff, etc.) was either done by me or by a graduate student being paid to work with me.* Given its small scale and lack of cash in and cash out practices, MAR could have been done with a wider pool of volunteer laborers. I actually support this model and have spoken up for it often, but in the actual doing, the mix of roles described here made sense to me for MAR. In part, this stemmed from MAR being an off-shoot of Museum Anthropology which, for a time, was run with as many variables as possible being held constant so as to provide a kind of natural experiment to contrast open access and conventional publishing in the sub-field that both journals served. The mode of editor (or pair of editors) plus assistant has been constant with Museum Anthropology from the time of my editorship and thus through the period of MAR’s history at issue here. Creating opportunities to support the work of graduate students interested in museum ethnography was always a key concern of mine in this work. It motivated my seeking the Museum Anthropology editorship in 2005 and it has remained a prominent goal throughout. I thank the College of Arts and Sciences and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research for supporting the assistantship positions that have at various points helped MAR prosper. I thank Janice Frisch (2019-2010), Teri Klassen (2014), and Emily Buhrow Rogers (2014-2017) for their hard work as editorial assistants with MAR.
IUScholarWorks: MAR would not be possible without the extraordinary vision, investment, and labor gathered in the IUScholarWorks program of the Indiana University Libraries. Focused on supporting open access scholarly communications efforts, IUScholarWorks (IUSW) has a number of signature projects, including Indiana University’s institutional repository and the IUScholarWorks Journals program. MAR was the first of the IUSW supported journals. This program has grown to include more than forty open access journal titles, including others of relevance to the ethnographic disciplines (Anthropology of East Europe Review, Ethnomusicology Translations, Studies in Digital Heritage, etc.).
I am not able to quantify the financial investments that the IU Libraries have made in MAR via the IUSW program, but the investment is significant and important. Most crucially, it is via IUSW that MAR has access to the incredible open access journal hosting and workflow software known as Open Journal Systems (OJS). OJS makes MAR possible and the IUSW librarians and staff make MAR on OJS possible. I want to express appreciation for the investment and incredible support that the IU Libraries have provided to me and to the MAR project. I hope to say more about the details of this support in the future and to quantify the technical and staff costs underlying it. For now, it may be enough to know that just as MAR tries to serve the field without charging fees for that service, IUSW tries to serve projects like MAR without charging fees for that service. It is certainly the case that economies of scale have been realized by having library-based publishing support services that can concurrently help a wide range of (mostly small) journal projects.
Indiana University Press: Technically, I could speak of the IU Press alongside IUScholarWorks. At Indiana University, our wonderful press is now a unit inside the IU Libraries. In this position, there is significant overlap and interdigitation between the open access publishing support work of IUScholarWorks and the general publishing work of the IU Press. But the two efforts also preserve some distinction. One way that MAR is increasingly being served by the IU Press is through promotion. As an outgrowth of the Press’ own commitment to fostering open access publishing, the Press has generously promoted MAR alongside its full suite of scholarly journals. As with the libraries as a whole and IUSW in particular, I cannot say enough good things about our press. The open access-fostering work of the Press, IUSW and the libraries in general are an outgrowth of a larger campus-wide and university-wide commitment that has been a key factor in the success of MAR and other OA (related) projects (JFRR, Material Vernaculars, Open Folklore) in which I have participated. I am appreciative of this support even as I cannot put a dollar figure on it. The key thing here is that MAR had not had to pay the IU Press to promote the journal (through print and web ads) just as it has not had to pay the libraries for IUSW services.
Conclusion: Responding to current calls for transparency in the work of open access journals is important. When I edited Museum Anthropology for the Council for Museum Anthropology Review, I was required to prepare and present annual editor’s reports that provided the board, the membership, and the AAA an auditable record of the journal’s editorial work and the financial realities of the journal in relation to the finances of AAA vis-à-vis its (then) publishing partners (University of California Press –> Blackwell/Wiley-Blackwell). By their nature, more emergent and grassroots projects (like MAR) lack formal institutional structures and thus they lack baked-in prompts for recording and reporting the facts of their existence. I hope that the accounting that I have provided here shows how one such project has functioned, particularly in terms of the flow of in-kind services. If cognate projects to MAR can also respond to calls for more public sharing of their underlying circumstances, the larger project of building a more equitable and sustainable system of scholarly communication can be advanced. I regret now not putting the facts noted above into written form sooner. Rather than end though on regret, let me close with a final word of appreciation to all of those who have provided the in-kind labor or financial support or technical infrastructure that has made MAR possible. See what you think of the results at: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/mar/issue/archive.
Note
*For the first time in MAR’s history, I paid a freelance copyeditor to edit three article manuscripts last month. Other duties prevented me from doing this work in a timely way and the assistantship role is not filled during the summer months. I paid for these edits out of discretionary funds raised through my involvement in other non-journal projects. Noting this fact allows me to record the value I place on the contributions that publishing professionals make in scholarly communication work. The DIY nature of MAR is an outgrowth of its nature and scale and is not a repudiation of professionalism in publishing work. Opposition to large corporate publishers is not the same thing as opposition to all publishers. I have devoted significant effort to supporting university presses and I try to be an ally to university press colleagues.
[Jason Baird Jackson is the author of this post. It was initially written on June 16-17, 2018 and published on Shreds and Patches on June 17, 2018. It is released under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. At the time of its publication, his twitter account “handle” is @jasonjackson116]
This is the season’s big lecture. With many heritage studies projects underway, it is a perfect time to welcome Regina back to Bloomington. Here are the details:
2016 Richard M. Dorson Memorial Folklore Lecture
Join us for the 6th Annual Richard M. Dorson Memorial Folklore Lecture.
“Value, Ownership, and Cultural Goods”
Regina F. Bendix, University of Gottingen, Germany
Monday, March 21, 2016
6:00-8:00 pm
800 N Indiana Ave
A reception will follow the lecture.
Abstract:
Since the mid-1990s, scholarship on heritage has blossomed – some might say boomed – and brought forth a plethora of new journals and studies in many languages, not least due to the vigorous work and impact of UNESCO’s heritage programs. UNESCO’s work on behalf of “cultural goods” reaches back roughly sixty years and has yielded many policy suggestions, conventions and programs. UNESCO’s activities in turn mobilized other international agencies concerned less with safeguarding valuables and more with ownership and group rights. They point toward ways in which different groups of actors harness the notions of tradition, folklore, culture or heritage to improve their lot on this earth. In their efforts, such groups are likely assisted more by experts in international law and economics than by students of culture.
For scholars in folklore and related fields, at least two tasks present themselves. One entails a continuation of a by now “traditional” task: understanding how excerpts from cultural scholarship, in their transfer and implementation in the public sphere transform, the practices, people and places we tend to study. A second task builds on this first one: we need to find avenues to communicate better with disciplines and practitioners engaged in establishing the legal norms and the economic projections concerning the fate of culture turned resource.
Shreds and Patches 