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AFSNews December 1997 (Part Four) |
Report of the Long-Range Planning Committee
This is a time of new beginnings for the Long-Range Planning Committee. "Planning the Society's Future," the AFS centennial strategic planning document that has so well guided our recent development, was produced almost 10 years ago. It is again time to assess current successes, challenges, and dilemmas and develop a comprehensive plan.
Indeed, the assessment process began more than a year ago, with the membership and graduate student surveys and the many serious and thoughtful discussions, scheduled and unscheduled, that took place at the 1996 Annual Meeting. The Long-Range Planning Committee built on these foundations at its midyear meeting in Arlington, VA, on Friday, April 4, 1997, brainstorming about the Society's strengths and needs. We have embarked on an extensive planning process at the end of which, in December 1998, we hope to present to the membership a draft document outlining goals, strategies, and tactical action recommendations for the Society's development over the next five to ten years.
This planning process will be broadly interactive and is constantly open to input from all Society members, who may either contact committee members directly or join the ongoing discussion on a new listserv, AFS-L@american. edu, which will be devoted entirely to long range planning issues. (To subscribe, send the following message to LISTSERV@AMERICAN.EDU: "SUBSCRIBE AFS-L YOUR FULL NAME.") The committee encourages all AFS members to write early and often. We also encourage members to conduct strategic discussions about AFS outside the framework of the annual meeting, within their own varied folkloristic constituencies--state, regional, occupational (students, teachers, public folklorists, etc.), institutional, ethnic, and so forth--and to communicate the results of these conversations to the Long-Range Planning Committee.
At its April 1997 meeting the committee identified many recent promising developments both in the AFS and in the activities of folklorists throughout the country. Some samples: the burgeoning collaboration of graduate folklore program heads; increased participation of graduate students at annual meetings and in their new AFS section; progress in AFS's development of electronic communications; lobbying to support federal agencies; the Careers column in AFS News; stipends for minority students and professionals to attend the Annual Meeting; the competitive travel funds available to support international scholarly participation in the Annual Meeting; high attendance at meetings and commitment of members; members' resourceful and entrepreneurial projects. Assessing the serious challenges that face the Society and the profession, the committee isolated three broad areas for initial attention, and scheduled a Friday morning forum at the 1997 Annual Meeting in Austin for general discussion of these with the membership. The areas are as follows:
(1) Strengthening the Academy: How and for What? Virtually all folklore programs and individual teachers of folklore at all levels are confronting changes in their task and in their resource base. This raises critical questions about how to teach and train folklorists and how to reach a wider constituency of traditional and nontraditional students.
(2) Entrepreneurial Opportunities and Professional Responsibilities. How do we take advantage of our current resources (skills, knowledge, investigative methodologies) to develop new professional roles and opportunities while maintaining our discipline's moral center and sense of ethical responsibility?
(3) AFS Membership and Governance: Diversity and Representation. Folklorists have long known that diversity resides both within and between communities, and within individuals. How can AFS work to build and diversify membership and simultaneously design its governance to represent and serve that diversity?
The committee continues to search for effective structures for dialogues on issues of concern to the AFS, and welcomes any and all suggestions.
Jo Radner
Report of the Membership Committee
The Membership Committee was established early this year to address the serious and ongoing issue of membership recruitment and retention and at the same time pull together the multiplying efforts related to membership recruitment and retention-- specifically, the Minority Participation Initiatives Task Force and the International Committee.
Members of the committee who were in Washington, D.C., at the time of the spring 1997 Executive Board meeting met and began discussing issues the committee should consider. The committee set up a listserv to discuss issues by e-mail. We arranged for Executive Secretary/Treasurer Shalom Staub to send membership brochures and the preliminary program for the annual meeting to graduate folklore programs to be shared with students at the beginning of the fall term; and directed Staub to exchange the AFS membership mailing list with other organizations of related interest, giving us a relatively inexpensive way to contact new potential members. We have made one exchange thus far with the American Society for Aesthetics. We requested a budget of $1,000 beginning September 1, 1997, to cover copying and mailing costs, long distance charges, et cetera, should we incur such expenses. We have made no expenditures to date.
The issues the committee will be exploring include reaching new groups of potential members through targeted marketing; following up with people who do not renew their memberships; setting up a sliding membership fee (based on income or ability to pay); outreach to community scholars and other categories of potential members; asking the Minority Participation Initiatives Task Force and the International Committee to make recommendations about recruitment and retention of the groups they are working with; buying advertising in or exchanging ads with other associations' newsletters and journals; taking AFS information to the meetings of other organizations; exploring the apparent decline in attendance at the annual meeting by people who have been members for many years; actively encouraging involvement in the society's sections, committees, task forces, and Executive Board; and broadening the concept of "academic programs" in our discussions, since potential members are studying folklore in many institutions outside formal folklore programs.
The committee will meet at AFS in Austin to review issues, set priorities, and assume individual tasks. The committee welcomes suggestions for other membership issues that need to be addressed. Please share your ideas with the committee through its Chair, Joe Goodwin (tel: 765/285-2430; e-mail: jgoodwin@bsu.edu).
Joe Goodwin
Report of the Nominating Committee
The American Folklore Society Nominating Committee--Barry Bergey (Chair), Robert Baron, and Marilyn White--conferred by teleconference in May to select candidates for the Executive Board and the Nominating Committee. We prepared a slate of six candidates to fill three slots on the Executive Board and two candidates for one slot on the Nominating Committee. Our goal was to forward a slate that would serve the Society well and would ably represent the interests of the Society's diverse membership.
The committee offered the following slate for the membership's consideration in the 1997 elections: for three three-year terms as Executive Board members, Charles Briggs, Gerald Davis, Kurt Dewhurst, Bess Lomax Hawes, Polly Stewart and Lesley Williams; and for one three-year term on the Nominating Committee, Elizabeth Peterson and Charles Seemann.
The Committee received two letters recommending candidates for consideration in the nomination process, and one of those candidates was included in the final slate. We are pleased to say that all candidates accepted our nomination with enthusiasm, and we look forward to the election process. We encourage all members to suggest names to the Nominating Committee for future elections. Any further suggestions for future nominations should be directed to the Committee's new chairperson, Robert Baron.
Barry Bergey
Report of the Program Committee
While our Program Committee was technically composed of the three cochairs--University of Texas at Austin faculty colleagues Itzik Gottesman from the German Department, Deborah A. Kapchan of Anthropology, and Roger deV. Renwick of English--we relied heavily on a host of consultants, advisors, helpers, and friends in bringing to fruition our part of AFS 1997. The Committee's odyssey was launched with the help of Martha Norkunas, who suggested that we build a theme around the idea of Memory, a suggestion to which all three Committee members were immediately attracted. For the formalization of that kernel idea and its discursive rendition in the Call for Papers, we drew further upon Martha's advice, as well as upon the advice of fellow folklorists Robbie Davis-Floyd, Yildiray Erdener, Pat Jasper, Carl Lindahl, Emily Socolov, and Lorre Weidlich. When the end of April and the beginning of May brought us in the mail over 500 long abstracts for evaluation, we called yet again upon our colleagues, and again Robbie, Pat, and Lorre answered our call, as did Suzanne Seriff. We were also delighted to have the assistance of Roger Janelli from Indiana University's Folklore Institute, who in spring 1997 was to our good fortune a visiting professor in Asian Studies at the University of Texas and who labored unsparingly alongside us throughout our three lengthy evaluation sessions.
From the start, we Program Committee members were worried about just how to handle the events that take place outside of the conference rooms, since those events called for special abilities none of us felt we had. We worried unnecessarily. Once again Pat Jasper and Suzanne Seriff, along with the staff at Texas Folklife Resources and the University of Texas's Memorial Museum, brought their considerable professional skills into play. The result was the Wednesday tour "The Tex-Mex Connection," which balanced for the participating meeting-goers both the intellectual and the sensual in that harmonious way which, while probably not unique to folklore as a profession, does seem to be one of our specialties. More on the sensual side was Pat's crowning achievement, the multicultural Saturday night dinner/dance "Barbecue, Blues, Boleros, and Breakdowns."
The Folklore and Memory theme evidently fired the imagination of our members as well, with the result that one-fifth of the 124 regular sessions--panels, forums, and workshops--had memory or a closely related word in their titles. Many of these sessions came to us already organized and named, but many we put together ourselves. Given that the memory concept is quite general, we occasionally used the opportunity to further a heightened and broadened sense of community among folklorists by eschewing, as organizing principles, obvious similarities in genre or theoretical orientation and constructing panels according to what we hoped were more imaginative, less obvious topical or thematic links.
Each year's Program Committee report includes suggestions for changing procedures in some way or another to improve the efficiency or quality of the Annual Meeting. We don't know how many of these suggestions actually become policy, and indeed we're doubtful that they always should be: after all, each Program Committee does the job but once, a slender basis on which to make authoritative pronouncements. Still, until a long-term committee is created to study in depth the existing modus operandi behind the Annual Meeting, the experience of each year's Program Committee is all we have to draw upon. Hence it behooves us too to offer our suggestions, with the understanding that we've performed the task just once and are not at all sure just how validly one can generalize from AFS 1997 to future years.
First of all we recommend, as others have, that we change the submission deadline: from April 15 to March 15. Human nature being what it is, the majority of submissions are mailed to the central office in Arlington, Virginia, during the last few days of grace; the result is that by the time AAA staff has processed the advance registrations, repackaged abstracts and forms, and mailed them to the Program Committee, April is practically over. Consequently, in just a fortnight or so the Committee must have 500-plus submissions recorded, long abstracts evaluated, and comments to those whose proposals need revision composed, their letters addressed, stamped, and mailed--and all this during the time of year, semester's end, when the academics who usually constitute the Program Committee are most busy in their regular employment with final examinations and term papers. Moreover, the preliminary program copy is due in Arlington by June 1; so there's also not much time for reflection in the making up of panels from individual submissions. We suggest therefore a modest refashioning of the dates with which we've worked for many years now: March 15 for submissions (instead of April 15), April 21 for requesting revisions (instead of May 12), May 15 for receipt of revised proposals (instead of May 27), July 1 (instead of July 15) for receipt of films and videos for continuous screening. All other deadlines would stay the same.
Second, we recommend that the Executive Board reaffirm commitment to a convention that has been in existence for as long as we can remember and that is unequivocally stated in the Call for Papers: that "each presenter may give only one paper or participate in only one workshop, forum, or video presentation during the regular sessions." Many proposals violated this rule, whether by ignoring it, by proposing a session that lasted two time periods, or by creatively reinterpreting the nature of their session's genre. But not only is the rule's wording perfectly clear, so too is its rationale: Meetings average about 120 sessions over the four days, which means that there are about 480 slots for major presentations, and that is just about the number of individuals who wish to participate. Resources are finite, in short, and can just accommodate the population of Meeting participants currently laying claim to them. An inordinate amount of the Committee's time was spent enforcing this rule, an expenditure we found both wasteful and stressful. We suggest that the rule be publicized more prominently and in fact be incorporated into one or more of the application forms so that Meeting participants will, in effect, police themselves.
Third, we recommend that the Executive Board be chary of apportioning specific Meeting tasks out to special individuals or committees. The theory behind such apportioning is sound enough--to give the job to the most qualified people, to take some of the work burden off of the Program Committee--but the resulting fragmentation of responsibility and lack of a sense of how the parts fit together may subvert the good intentions. While nothing of a dire nature occurred with AFS 1997, the Executive Board's decision to charge an ad hoc committee with the job of arranging a plenary session without specifying the chain of communication and command between that ad hoc committee and the Program Committee did not work well. Too many assumptions were made on all sides, and drawing from the start a clearer picture of the structure, direction, and timing of decision making and information flow would have produced a result that better matched expectations. A related matter of fragmented communication has to do with the proposing of certain special events that have become more or less habitual at the annual meeting: because they are customary, the assumption may exist that they are automatically part of the Program Committee's knowledge. But that's not necessarily the case, and it would both ease the Committee's task and aid the efficiency of program construction if all special events requiring program scheduling, including those initiated by the Executive Board or by its individual members, were duly proposed each year on the appropriate forms, through the usual channels, and by the required deadline, even such predictable ones as the Board meeting with section conveners, the folk art auction, and the reception for international scholars.
Our remaining three suggestions are of more modest import. Fourth, we recommend that the roles of organizer and chair of organized sessions--that is, sessions submitted as single proposals--be combined. Their frequent bifurcation created database complexities that we found unnecessarily convoluted and conducive to error. (Some preformed session proposals requested that an organizer who was not even a participant in the session be the contact person.) We recommend that the chair always be the required contact person between the Committee on the one hand and the panel/forum/workshop as a whole on the other. Fifth, we found the matter of section sponsorship somewhat haphazard and arbitrary. We suggest the Board mandate that each section convener supply the Program Committee, by the regular submission deadline for paper proposals, with an official list of organized sessions the section will sponsor and that the Program Committee recognize no other claims to sponsorship. Specific session chairs desiring sponsorship should petition section conveners for it, in other words, not the Program Committee. Systematizing sponsorship in this way would also aid the Committee in drawing up the eventual Program schedule of sessions. And finally, sixth, we recommend that the regulations governing film and videotape presentations be clarified. The Committee was unsure how to handle almost-hour-long films proposed for regular session presentations, for example; we recommend that any presentation centered in a film or video over 20 minutes in length be combined with similar presentations into sessions and that such sessions be held in the videoroom, which exists at every meeting as the site of continuous film/video screenings.
We have, post facto, constructed a revised version of our AFS 1997 Call for Papers and its accompanying forms to take into consideration what we think we've learned from our brief experience. We have submitted these reworked versions to the Executive Secretary/Treasurer and suggest that between now and December, when the copy for AFS 1998 is due, the Executive Board and the Secretary/ Treasurer look over our revisions, rejecting, accepting, or modifying them as they see fit. We emphasize that any decision on redesigning the three forms in particular--Long Abstract Form, Short Abstract Form, and Registration Form--must be made quickly, as AAA's production staff will need some time to recast them into computer format. Time is not as pressing in the matter of changes to the Call's discursive portion.
Over the last year, the Program Committee has benefited enormously from the large logistical support network essential to any Meeting's success. Shalom Staub, our Society's Executive Secretary/Treasurer, and Elizabeth Price, our liaison with the American Anthropological Association, responded to all our requests quickly, informatively, and always to-the-point, qualities that one truly appreciates when deadlines come fast and furious. Similarly helpful were Moira Smith, our chief contact with the committee overseeing organization of computer matters at the Meeting itself, and Ken Thigpen, our film and video committee contact. Michelle Moore was a superb technical specialist, creating a computer program that the less technical Committee members marveled at and dedicating herself to the job with a willingness and intensity of purpose that should by right endow her with the title of honorary folklorist. The English Department of the University of Texas, chaired by James A. Garrison, and the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology, directed by one of the undersigned, Deborah A. Kapchan, provided welcome resources that took a bite out of their institutional budgets; these contributions will be appreciated by anyone who understands how difficult it is to get money from university coffers. And while we won't know who they are until long after this Report has gone to press and so can't recognize them here by name, the volunteers who sat behind convention tables, saw that needed equipment traveled from room to room during the Meeting itself, and performed a host of other tasks, have our deepest gratitude. Finally, our personal thanks to all AFS 1997 Meeting participants themselves who, despite how irritated at or mystified by the Program Committee's actions they may at times have been, bore with us.
Itzik Gottesman, Deborah A. Kapchan, Roger deV. Renwick
Report of the Publications Committee
The committee considered several important issues over the last year. One was the future of the AFS Publications Series, which has been moribund for two years. Not everyone on the Committee was convinced that the series should be revived, but we all agreed that if it is, there should be some major changes to improve and establish a greater focus. There should be just one press and not several as was the case in the past. One idea was to have a thematic focus, which would give the series a stronger identity, with a title such as "Culture and Tradition" or "Studies in Expressive Culture." A major press is preferable, but we should listen to offers from smaller presses. So far, Texas A&M Press has made an offer, and Utah State University Press has expressed interest. The committee thought that these should be considered but that other presses should be contacted. Whichever press is chosen, promotion of the series should be expanded. Standards for inclusion should be tightened, and only a few of the very best manuscripts should be accepted each year. The Editor should continue to encourage minority authors to submit to PAFS.
We discussed several ways that AFS publications could further the mission of the Society in promoting cultural diversity and minority recruitment. One idea was to set up a system whereby established scholars could offer assistance to young minority scholars in improving their manuscripts prior to publication. Another suggestion was to support the updating of Abrahams and Szwed's 1978 bibliography on African American folk culture.
The Committee began a discussion about establishing an AFS Web site, but this work was soon taken over by a new committee devoted to that specific task. The Web Site Committee made tremendous progress in the last year. A separate report by the Chair of that committee appears in this Annual Report.
Pat Mullen