The Folklore Student Association at the Ohio State University, in collaboration with the Department of Folklore & Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, is hosting the 2018 11th Annual IU/OSU Student Conference in Folklore and Ethnomusicology, entitled Folklore at Work. In light of the events of 2017, which stand on far longer and more unsettling legacies, this year’s conference will breach the topic of the wider lives that cultural heritage and claims to tradition have in our world--sometimes justice-seeking, but sometimes hate-aligned. The conference will explore the question of what it means to put cultural work to work in the world, with particular attention to public-sector, applied, community-based and advocacy folklore and ethnomusicology. We are asking: why does our work matter, for the issues of the world?
Folklorists have long debated the place "applied" folklore studies should hold in relation to "academic" folklore scholarship. And there has been a fear that in focusing on our scholarship's potential for political and social engagement, we risk a loss of rigor and the insight that can come from reflection at a distance from events. However, this conference begins with the premise that folklore, and our study of it, is always already embedded in the social and political lives of researchers and collaborator-communities. Thus, while we welcome papers on new avenues and contexts in which folklore might be utilized, we also welcome reflexive papers exploring the ways in which folklore, and folkloristics, is itself always "at work" upon the lives of informants and researchers alike.
