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.

New Special Projects

American Folklore Society Technical Assistance Program

NOTE: ALL THE 2009-2010 FUNDING AVAILABLE IN THIS PROGRAM HAS NOW BEEN AWARDED. IF WE RECEIVE SUPPORT TO CONTINUE THE PROGRAM, YOU WILL BE ABLE TO REQUEST NEW CONTRACTS IN JUNE 2010.

The AFS Technical Assistance Program, funded by a one-year grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, provides short-term contracts 1) for consulting work that will demonstrate best practices for the folk and traditional arts in the US and strengthen the capabilities of non-profit organizations and state, county, or local government agencies working in the field, or 2) to provide professional growth for the staffs of such organizations and agencies and for independent contractors engaged in folk and traditional arts work. This program does not support arts projects. A single consultant, organization, or individual may receive only one technical assistance contract per year.

We will support two kinds of activities with reimbursement contracts:

1. Short-term consultancies (up to 5 days) by best-practice experts in such areas as archiving, concert or festival production, fundraising, exhibition or publication design, field documentation, marketing and publicity, media production, or organizational development and management, among others. These may be accomplished by having the consultant travel to you or by you traveling to visit the consultant’s organization. In addition to a final written and financial report, the consultant with whom we contract must also provide AFS with a written summary of best practices for the field in the area in which s/he has provided services, which we will make available on the AFS web site.

You may request up to $3,000 for consultancies.

2. Travel by individual cultural specialists for professional development purposes; e.g., to visit a model program or organization, to meet with other organizations to develop partnership activities, or to participate in a special meeting of strategic relevance. Videoconferencing is also possible. In addition to a final written and financial report, you must provide AFS with a written summary of best practices for the field that you learned as a result of the travel, which we will make available on the AFS web site.

You may request up to $2,000 for travel. (Note: You may not request funding from this program for travel to the AFS annual meeting.)

We will offer Technical Assistance contracts on a first-come, first-served basis beginning June 25, 2009.

We generally will be able to review and make decisions on requests within 2 weeks of receiving them. We will pay out contract funds within 2 weeks of the date when we receive final descriptive and financial reports, accompanied by copies of receipts for approved expenses, on the funded activity.

To access these technical assistance or professional development opportunities, please e-mail a letter of no more than 3 pages in PDF format to AFS Executive Director Tim Lloyd (lloyd.100@osu.edu), containing the following information:

Consultancies

1. A brief summary of your organization’s mission and of its history of folk arts work (independent contractors, please provide a CV or professional biography)

2. A description of the purpose and impact of, and a plan of work for, the consultancy, including the deliverables the consultant will provide. These deliverables must include a written summary of best practices for the field in the area in which s/he has provided services.

3. A brief statement of the relevant qualifications of the consultant(s) you want to use (please also attach a CV, professional biography, or other evidence of the experience and abilities of each consultant in PDF format)

4. A budget for the project, and a brief description of what changes you would make to the project if we cannot fund your request fully (Allowable costs include those for consultant fees, transportation, lodging, and meals.)

Travel

1. A brief summary of your professional work in folk arts

2. A description of the impact of the professional growth opportunities this travel will enable you to undertake, and of the details of the travel involved

3. A budget for the project, and a brief description of what changes you would make to the project if we cannot fund your request fully (Allowable costs include those for transportation, lodging, meals, meeting or conference registration, and videoconferencing.)

Big Questions and the Disciplines Project

The Society has received a two-year grant from the Teagle Foundation as part of its "Big Questions and the Disciplines" initiative. The Foundation received over 60 pre-applications, invited 15 applicants to submit full proposals, and funded five organizations nationwide.

This initiative provides grants to support the gathering of scholar-teachers from particular fields to discuss a Big Question of central importance to the humanities or social sciences and, based upon that Big Question, to develop and test curriculum materials to more deeply engage undergraduate student education.

The Big Question we chose for our project--"What is the relationship between lay and expert knowledge in a complex society?"--will allow us to bring the legacy of the field to bear on several critical questions and to design undergraduate curricula to address them more explicitly, including:

How does lay knowledge negotiate among experience, events, and social conventions?
How is it transmitted in the absence of codification, and in what sense does it persist over time?
How do informal and codified knowledge interact, or fail to interact, in different social and historical settings?
How do the rhetorical strategies of each affect their reception?

Over the next two years project co-directors Tim Lloyd (AFS) and Dorry Noyes (The Ohio State University) will convene a group of eight folklorists--

Michael Chiarappa, Department of History, Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo)
Danille Elise Christensen, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University (Bloomington)
Jason Baird Jackson, Director, Folklore Institute, Indiana University (Bloomington)
Sabina Magliocco, Chair, Department of Anthropology, California State University (Northridge)
Jay Mechling, Department of American Studies, University of California (Davis)
Tom Mould, Department of Anthropology, Elon University (Elon, North Carolina)
Leonard Norman Primiano, Department of Religious Studies, Cabrini College (Radnor, Pennsylvania)
Howard Sacks, Interim Provost, Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio)--

who, with AFS associate director Lorraine Cashman, will carry out work on this project. Their academic homes--liberal arts colleges, urban commuter schools, small state schools, and large land-grant institutions--represent the diversity of institutions where folklorists teach today, of those institutions' student bodies, and of the knowledges those students are bringing to the classroom.

This project will also serve as a beginning for a long-term effort by AFS to strengthen undergraduate education in folklore--an effort in which we hope many of our members will take part--intended to deepen the contributions of our field to the academy, and to strengthen our field by attracting talented and committed young scholars and public humanists to undergraduate and graduate study in folklore.

Folklore and Health Policy Working Group

The individuals and communities that folklorists study have beliefs, values, and practices regarding their health that are affected in various ways by policies imposed from above. These policies often run counter to the values and goals of their intended beneficiaries, and in addition have unintended consequences that may be detrimental. Folklorists have the opportunity to better inform health policies through their fieldwork and scholarship in ways that will improve the well- being of these local communities and their members. The field of folklore has a responsibility to include this work among its activities.

In July 2008, five folklorists who work in the area of health policy (Erika Brady, Bonnie O’Connor, Diane Goldstein, Michael Owen Jones, and David Hufford) met in Columbus, Ohio, at the invitation of the AFS Executive Board to discuss ways in which the field could develop its contributions to the field of health policy, and to develop a series of products that a) will articulate the contributions that folklorists have made to the development, implementation, and evaluation of public policy in health care fields; and b) will highlight specific future areas of application of folklorists’ perspectives and work to health care public policy issues. The group also led a discussion forum on this work at the 2008 annual meeting in Louisville.

At present, the group is working toward several concrete outcomes, including a jointly authored article (tentatively titled "Local Knowledge in Health Policy: An Unmet Need") for publication in a health policy journal, a monograph of instructive case studies, and a set of resource materials for the AFS web site.

This project is intended as a template for future AFS efforts in other public policy areas in which folklorists' work and insights can make a positive impact, such as immigration or food and agriculture. A subcommittee of the Society's Executive Board (Lucy Long, Amy Skillman, and Bill Westerman) is now considering these and other possibilities for future work.

Continuing Special Projects

James Madison Carpenter Collection Project

The AFS is managing a third 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 and Ian Russell of the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, is carrying out work on this project in collaboration with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, in whose archives the Carpenter Collection is housed and maintained. The Center's web site includes a guide and finding aid to the Collection, and a catalogue of the Collection is also available online.

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.

Veterans History Project

Since 2002, AFS has been engaged in a partnership with the Veterans History Project, an effort of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress originally supported by the US Congress and AARP. AFS provides 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 US military veterans of war (and those civilians who supported them).

World Intellectual Property Organization

Since 2002, AFS has been accredited as an official non-governmental participant in the activities of the World Intellectual Property Organization's 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 Society's delegate to the IGC-GRTKF is Dr. Sandy Rikoon of the Department of Rural Sociology of the University of Missouri, Columbia. You can find a bibliography and webography of documents related to WIPO's work with folklore here.