Special Projects

In addition to its work on publications, annual meeting, prizes and awards, and interest-group activities, the AFS carries out special projects as a way of increasing public understanding of the field, supporting the work of Society members, and building partnerships with other organizations. Except where noted otherwise below, for more information on these projects please contact AFS Executive Director Timothy Lloyd.

James Madison Carpenter Collection Project

The AFS is managing a second two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a scholarly edition of the James Madison Carpenter Collection, a groundbreaking collection of folk music, song, drama, dance, narrative, and children's folklore documented in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the US between 1927 and 1955. A team of US and UK scholars, led by Julia Bishop of the University of Sheffield and Ian Russell of the University of Aberdeen, is carrying out work on this project. The Carpenter Collection itself is housed at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

Ethnographic Thesaurus Project

The AFS, in partnership with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, has developed an Ethnographic Thesaurus. The Ethnographic Thesaurus is a searchable online vocabulary that can be used to improve access to information about folklore, ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and related fields.

The Society and Center developed the Thesaurus with the support of a generous grant from the Scholarly Communications Program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Thesaurus provides a comprehensive controlled language of terms that folklorists, archivists, and librarians can use to classify the enormous variety of literature about cultural practices and expressions produced by folklorists, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and other cultural researchers.

Over a century of collecting and archiving ethnographic recordings and accompanying material has created a demand for the coordinated archival description of this body of work. In the coming century, the Ethnographic Thesaurus will be essential to efforts to describe ethnographic collections and to digitize them for online presentation and retrieval.

Human Subjects Research Regulations and Policies

AFS is working with the Office of Human Research Protections of the US Department of Health and Human Services to discuss the applicability to folklore research of federal IRB requirements regarding the protection of human subjects. We are contending that folklore research is fundamentally different, in both its goals and its methods, from the biomedical research most human subjects regulations are designed to govern.

AFS has issued a position statement about this matter. Look to this section of AFSNet for news of further developments in this area.

Professional Development Sessions at the 2005 AFS Annual Meeting

Beginning in 2003, AFS has produced a series of professional development sessions, intended for students and new professionals in our field, at our annual meeting each October. These sessions bring experienced academic, independent, and public folklorists together to exchange information about important professional development topics–strategies for gaining promotion and tenure, working effectively with the media, and to demonstrate the contributions folklorists are making and can make to a variety of academic fields and public service or public policy professions. We will produce additional sessions at our October 19-23, 2005, annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.

Occasionally, AFS members or interest-group sections produce their own professional development sessions at our annual meeting. For example, in 2004 the AFS Archives and Libraries section produced a two-part workshop on digitizing folklife collections.

Veterans History Project

In 2002, AFS began work on a contract with the Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project, a five-year effort supported by the U.S. Congress and AARP. From 2002 to 2007, AFS is providing folklorists and oral historians to lead workshops throughout the country for community groups of all kinds on collecting the personal experience stories and oral histories of U.S. military veterans of war (and those civilians who supported them). For more information, contact the Veterans History Project.

World Intellectual Property Organization

AFS has been accredited as an official non-governmental participant in the activities of the WIPO Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC-GRTKF). The WIPO, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, brings together over 90% of the world’s governments and over 150 non-governmental organizations to develop and oversee international policies, agreements, and treaties about intellectual property—the ownership rights of creators, artists, researchers, inventors, and the like to their work.

The AFS is concerned that protection of the rights of traditional communities and their members not be overlooked in WIPO philosophy, policies and agreements, or in other comparable international arenas, to be is replaced there by solely commercial interests. We are also concerned that many traditional communities’ own customary and traditional systems for protecting ownership and cultural rights are not sufficiently incorporated into the working knowledge of such international organizations or the governments of their nation-state members.

In 2002, the Society’s Executive Board approved a document, which we presented to WIPO late that year, outlining sixteen recommendations for actions the WIPO should take to mitigate the impact of transnational intellectual property systems on traditional communities and to bring traditional communities into more active participation in the international discussion of intellectual property issues. Since that time, AFS has been an active participant in the work and meetings of the IGC, and an advocate for the perspectives of traditional communities and the scholars who study them.

The WIPO has just posted its most recent major document on intellectual property and folklore, which will be discussed at the next meeting of the WIPO IGC in November. Find it here.

Find a bibliography and webography of documents related to WIPO's work with folklore here.