Shared Traditions: More than Human Experiences

February 28- March 1, 2025 | The Ohio State University | Columbus, OH

The Indiana University/Ohio State University Graduate Student Conference will be held at Ohio State University on Friday, February 28 through Saturday, March 1. We are excited to host conversations that revolve around our theme: Shared Traditions: Beyond Human Experiences.

Register to attend the conference here

February 28 will be held on the third floor of the 18th Avenue Library (Research Commons) and March 1 will be held in the Timashev Family Music Building, room 120.

We are thrilled to host a wide variety of panels given by students from Ohio State University, Indiana University, and beyond! We will also have an invited presentation by our own Dr. Laura Siragusa (Linguistics) and a guest keynote presentation by Dr. Langston Collin Wilkins (UW Madison).

This event is free and open to the public!

Contact the OSU Folklore Student Association with any questions at osu.studentfolk@gmail.com

Conference Dates: February 28th–March 1st

Please note that the deadline for the call for proposals has passed, and we are not currently accepting submissions.

We constantly interact with people, objects, and lived environments to engage with our multidisciplinary studies. While many of our cultural studies focus on human actions and structures, we invite you to consider more-than-human actors that affect and alter the course of human experience and culture. By examining both human and nonhuman relationships, we can develop new frameworks for understanding human action (and inaction). Incorporating ecological histories, material cultures, and technologies allows us to consider those cast to the margins and investigate counternarratives.

We offer the theme Shared Traditions: More than Human Experiences as an invitation to foreground the material, ecological, and technological dimensions of human perspectives with decolonial and under-acknowledged histories. We offer this theme to engage critically with disciplinary developments in folklore, ethnomusicology and religious studies graduate student scholarship. Specifically, we welcome perspectives that are interdisciplinary in nature and prompt critical discussion and reflection on emergent applied and academic trajectories. We encourage those presenting to engage with questions about their own citational practices (both formal and informal) and the kinds of relationships we are invoking, and what kind of futures those open up.

In a similar vein, we’re inviting you to play with forms and genres. As interdisciplinary scholars, we are experts in how form carries meaning and shapes communication. What impact does changing the form of our communication in academic settings have on our messages? What does it do to the kinds of conversations we want to have? What do we learn from prioritizing different kinds of media? Some possibilities:

• Paper Presentation (20min. or 5 min. presentation and discussion)
• Forums
• Performance Lectures/Jam Sessions
• Workshops
• Workshop, Skill-Share, or Training
• Media Session or Presentation
• Pop-Up Exhibitions/Installation
• Poster Presentations

Not currently accepting submissions

Request housing with OSU graduate students here

Contact the OSU Student Folklore Association with any questions.