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: