News and Announcements
For upcoming events and for information on the Center's activities and folklore programs at Ohio State, please see the Center's Calendar of Events. If you would like to post special folklore news or events for the OSU folklore community, please send your requests to post to Sheila Bock at smbock99@yahoo.com.For timely e-mail reminders of Center activities and special announcements, sign up on FOLKSERV, the listserv of the Center for Folklore Studies. To join, send an email message to: listproc@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu. Leave the subject line blank. In the body of the message, type: Subscribe folkserv YourFirstname YourLastname
Kudos to Amy Shuman
for yet another important book relating to narrative, this time as applied to political asylum cases:Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century
By Carol Bohmer and Amy Shuman
Many nations recognize the moral and legal obligation to accept people fleeing from persecution, but political asylum applicants in the twenty-first century face restrictive policies and cumbersome procedures. So, what counts as persecution? How do applicants translate their stories of suffering and trauma into a narrative acceptable to the immigration officials? How can asylum officials weed out the fake from the genuine without resorting to inappropriate cultural definitions of behavior?
Using both in depth accounts by asylum applicants and interviews with lawyers and others involved, this book takes the reader on a journey through the process of applying for asylum in both the United States and Great Britain. It describes how the systems address the conflicting needs of the state to protect their citizens from terrorists and the influx of hordes of unwelcome economic migrants, while at the same time adhering to their legal, moral and treaty obligations to provide safe haven for those fleeing persecution.
Rejecting Refugees is an insightful and fresh evaluation of the obstacles asylum applicants face and the cultural, procedural, and political discrepancies in the political asylum process. This makes it ideal reading to students and scholars of political science, international relations, sociology, law and anthropology.
Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century
Congratulations also to CFS staff members
Sheila Bock and Kirsi Haenninen for triumphing over their candidacy exams and advancing to ABD status!Newly Approved GIS in Folkore
The Center for Folklore Studies at the Ohio State University is delighted to announce the creation of a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Folklore, approved by the Council on Academic Affairs on September 6th, 2007. This interdisciplinary minor offers a formal credential in folklore to Masters and PhD students in any field. It provides both focus and flexibility for students, balancing core courses with electives that can overlap with the student’s degree program. Thirteen departments from four colleges (Humanities, Arts, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Education and Human Ecology) co-sponsor the Folklore G.I.S. See a description of the GIS and its requirements.Call for Proposals:
Urban Party Mix: Performing the Americas in the Metropole
The Center for Folklore Studies invites grad students and advanced undergraduates in any relevant discipline to submit proposals for special student sessions attached to its spring colloquium.
Bowen Theatre, Drake Center
February 21-23, 2008
The simultaneous deterritorialization and re-rooting of Latin American and Caribbean forms of celebration within urban centers of Europe and the United States has accentuated their essential hybridity and intensified social and aesthetic transformations in the performing communities. In honor of the Columbus opening of the exhibit "Midnight Robbers: The Artists of Notting Hill Carnival," this colloquium will place the London carnival in conversation with emerging Latin- and LusoAmerican dance scenes in Newark, New Jersey. In both locales the individual and collective identities of performing revelers are changing. As new and diverse groups acquire styles of bodily expression associated with the marginalized Americas, what are the aesthetic, economic, social, and political effects? Come discuss the promise and challenges of hybrid forms among shifting populations.
The colloquium speakers include:
- Barbara Browning, Associate Professor of Performance Studies, New York University (keynote speaker)
- Katherine Borland, Associate Professor of Comparative Studies, OSU-Newark
- Julian Henriques, Filmmaker and Lecturer, Goldsmiths College, University of London
- Kimberly DaCosta Holton, Associate Professor of Portuguese and Lusophone World Studies, Rutgers University-Newark
- Ali Pretty, Artistic Director, Kinetika Arts International, UK
- Ruth Tompsett, Theatre historian and co-director, Carnival Exhibition Group
Interested students should contact Center for Folklore Studies Director Dorothy Noyes at noyes.10@osu.edu as soon as possible; full one-page abstracts for review will be due on November 15th.
Congratulations to Eric Shepherd!
Our recent DEALL PhD and master kuaishu performer Eric Shepherd has just been featured in the government-published English language Beijing newspaper, China Daily. Eric soon begins his new position as Assistant Professor of Chinese at Iowa State University, where we all wish him the very best.End of Year Kudos!
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Our PhDs for 2006-2007:
Selina Lim, Political Science, "Rethinking Albert O. Hirschman's 'Exit, Voice, and Loyalty': The Case of Singapore."
Terry Schoone-Jongen, Theatre (Presidential Fellow), "Tulip Time, U.S.A.: Staging Memory, Identity and Ethnicity in Dutch-American Community Festivals.
Eric Shepherd, East Asian Languages and Literatures (Presidential Fellow), "A Pedagogy of Culture Based on Chinese Storytelling Traditions."
Mickey Weems, Education Policy and Leadership, "The Fierce Tribe: Crack Whores, Body Fascists, and Circuit Queens in the Spiritual Performance of Non-Violent Masculinity."
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Another paper prize winner:
Anna Messinger, winner of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2006-07 Kahrl Award for the best undergraduate paper on a medieval topic, for her paper "Half a Loaf and a Tilted Cup: The Diffusion of Hospitality Throughout the Norse Cosmos," written for Professor Merrill Kaplan's SCAN 222: Nordic Mythology and Medieval Culture in Autumn 2006.
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Publications
The Ohio Humanities Council is sponsoring a showing of the Smithsonian traveling exhibition "Key Ingredients: America by Food" in various venues throughout the state. The accompanying booklet, Key Ingredients: Ohio by Food features essays by our own Tim Lloyd, Ohio colleagues Howard Sacks and Lucy Long, and other folklorists, as well as a county-based guide to Ohio foodways by OSU folklore students Sheila Bock and Ashley Overstreet, who are featured enjoying local specialties in several of the photographs. For the exhibition sites and to order the booklet, see the OHC Web site.
