2025 AFS Annual Meeting Presidential Plenary: “You Gotta Go with Your Gut:” Navigating Risk and Fear in the Storm

AFS President Amy Skillman will give the Presidential Plenary for the 2025 Annual Meeting on Sunday, October 19, 4:00–5:00 p.m. EDT in Georgia Ballroom at Crowne Plaza Atlanta Midtown. The title of the plenary is “You Gotta Go with Your Gut:” Navigating Risk and Fear in the Storm.

In the year since we gathered in Albuquerque to explore the concept of the “global storm,” the infrastructure of our field has been rocked to its foundations, much like a ship in a storm at sea. Such times test our values, pushing us into new and often unknown realms of risk-taking. We find ourselves struggling to balance risk and safety, reframing our narratives to reclaim agency in our lives and work. Drawing on the narratives of women sea captains who’ve faced storms and wrestled with uncertainty, I explore the role of embodied knowledge in facing our fears and taking risks.

The plenary will also be accessible via Zoom for remote attendees.

Amy Skillman (Goucher College) is AFS President 2024–25. Throughout her career, she has worked in non-profit organizations, higher education institutions, and government agencies to design programs that sustain artistic traditions while striving for cultural equity.

Skillman is a folklorist whose work occurs at the intersection of culture and tension, where paying attention to culture can serve to mediate social change and foster cultural equity. She advises artists and community-based organizations on the implementation of programs that honor and conserve their cultural traditions, guides them to potential resources, and works with them to build their capacity to sustain these initiatives. For over 20 years, her work has integrated personal experience narratives of immigrant and refugee women into leadership empowerment initiatives. Working in collaboration with the PA Immigrant and Refugee Women’s Network, she has co-produced an exhibition called Our Voices, a theater piece about Coming to America in the 21^st Century, and a reader’s theater called Magnificent Healing, which explores various cultural collisions with our healthcare system. She is currently working with the Susquehanna Folk Music Society to document traditional artists in Central Pennsylvania and create public programming that draws attention to and honors the breadth and depth of their work.

Her other work includes a Grammy-nominated recording of Old Time fiddlers in Missouri, a yearlong arts residency with alternative education high school students rooted in the ethnography of their lives, and a traveling exhibition called Making It Better, about the role of folk arts as a catalyst for activism in communities throughout Pennsylvania. She has been teaching in the MA in Cultural Sustainability at Goucher College (MACS) program since 2011 and became Director in 2012. She is a Fellow of the American Folklore Society and a recipient of the society’s Benjamin A. Botkin Prize for significant lifetime achievement in public folklore.