One of the central questions the host committee invites you to consider is: how do stories and the act of restoring/restorying give agency to those who have been systematically disempowered or whose stories have been lost through attrition caused by time? Though stories can be informational, entertaining, and even enlightening, they can also be didactic, untrue, or misleading, especially when they omit or elide information. To that end, we define restorying as the respeaking, rewriting, or refashioning of stories that have been erased, forgotten, or subsumed under the auspices of a larger story. It is a process that gives agency to those who have been disenfranchised or neglected through systematic erasure. Inspired by the counter storytelling practice of legal scholars that amplifies voices that would otherwise go unheard, restorying is often an act of restorative justice. Restorying has at times been necessary for immigrants, asylum seekers, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, people with disabilities, trauma survivors, and even BIPOC scholars, among others. Often, these individuals must restory their experiences, concealing their lived experience in order to gain access to resources, social acceptance, safe spaces, and community. Advocates inside and outside these groups have created/fought to create spaces where people can restore the narratives to reflect their challenging/challenged pasts and to reclaim their experiences as they move forward.
Storytellers, folklorists, and other scholars use stories to varied ends, even to the detriment of the storyteller at times. Literary scholars use stories to help students understand plot; oral historians use stories gained through interviews to add missing pieces to historical records; scholars including Saidiya Hartman and Tiya Miles have created methodologies like critical fabulation that use archives to craft stories of enslaved people’s lives; legal scholars have written parables and autobiography to help build cases. Scholars study the way trial lawyers construct theories of a case–narratives, if you will–that they hope will influence a jury. Material culture offers a means to reclaim narratives that have been erased or forgotten, embedding them in tangible forms that endure and thus, serve as vibrant conduits for storytelling, where objects, tools, and spaces become vessels for narratives that bridge the past, present, and future. Every handmade artifact holds a story of its creator and the community it serves. These stories do more than preserve—they adapt and evolve, shaping how generations understand their identities and relationships with the world. Restoring these practices not only revives technical skills but also fosters intergenerational dialogue, creating pathways for knowledge transfer and cultural renewal. The ubiquity of stories and their myriad effects on our daily lives reflects their social, cultural, and their legal significance.
While restorying can be an act of restorative justice, material culture, music, customs, internet folklore, and most other modes of expression that folklorists research are also restorative, as things people make, songs we sing, spaces we create, and activities we engage in all have rich multi-valent, multivocal, multi-level components and resonances. Yet how are these resonances and the complexity of our cultural productions altered by artificial intelligence? How does AI disrupt the restorative potential of stories? With the rise of A.I., we consider concepts of co-opting, collaborative, and stolen stories. Authorial intention and artistic integrity are long-standing concerns of folklorists who try to attend to interrelationships between performers, audiences, scholars, and culture at large.
As the site of this year’s annual meeting, Atlanta also has a unique story. While the moniker Cradle of the Civil Rights movement speaks to the historical significance of the city, others—Silicon Peach or Hollywood of the South—appear to be intentional rebrands of the city’s identity. Such shifts, while subtle, deflect attention from some of the city’s more infamous stories. In Evidence of Things Not Seen, James Baldwin investigates the gaps in the investigation of Atlanta’s missing children, a mystery that does not have a clear resolution to this day, while Atlanta native Tayari Jones fictionalizes this tragedy in her novel Leaving Atlanta. These are just two of the many creative responses to one of the most famous stories of Atlanta. Yet we know there are many other stories the city tells through its foods, its traditions, its music, its architectural structures, and through its people. Bringing together partners before and after this year’s annual meeting from the Oral History Association and Society of Ethnomusicology, the American Folklore Society’s host committee invites you to submit abstracts for presentations that address one or more of the following:
- examinations of stories grounded in Atlanta and Georgia’s cultural traditions or its many vibrant subcultures.
- explorations of what narrative or story means in the age of A.I.
- considerations of the ways technologies like ArcGIS facilitate storytelling.
- analyses of the role of material culture in storytelling and/or as storytelling. By examining the role of material culture in storytelling, we invite reflections on how the act of making—and the objects made—reshapes our collective understanding of place, time, and belonging.
- investigations of the scientific implications of stories. There is also a growing body of neuroscience research on how the brain processes stories and how stories shape the brain, so what are the scientific implications of narrative and/or restorying?
- analyses of themes of restoration in stories and that explore the restorative power of stories, including the performance of these stories.
- examinations of the legal implications of narratives.
- ethnographies that amplify marginalized voices, especially those of distinctive local, state, and regional subcultures.
- refashionings and/or reclaimings of the narratives of immigrants, asylum seekers, and trauma survivors.
Call For Proposals has opened and will remain open through April 1, 2025. Follow AFS Annual Meeting News for further updates.