The American Folklore Society invites you to explore what it means to persist—to be tenacious, steadfast, insistent—in the face of social and environmental challenges.
We approach community persistence as the work of maintaining, adapting, and reimagining collective identity and connection when physical, social, or economic change threatens to sever the ties that bind people to place and to each other. Particularly relevant is what Rachel González-Martin has described as rooting: not a static anchoring to place, but rather “a constant process of revision and reimagination” that “conjur[es] stability” by “honoring disorder, ambivalence, and speculation” (2021, 36). Persistence can also be romanticized in ways that obscure ongoing harm and omit uncomfortable truths, that mobilize tradition in order to exclude, or that ask communities to endure intersecting violences rather than participate in and benefit from structural change.
Further, as social and environmental disasters continue to uproot or displace communities and force migration, Kate Parker Horigan has described how culture workers increasingly become “survivor-ethnographers” (2022). Folklorists have organized workshops that address intersections of place and loss for both migrating and receiving communities, experiences that engage cultural practices and community learnings as tools for social survival (Richardson, Kay, Owens, and Frandy 2023).
Thus, we ask: How do individuals and groups acknowledge loss while refusing erasure, participating in a reckoning with change that includes a determined imagining of what might yet be built or reclaimed? And what role does vernacular culture play in these responses? In the midst of crisis and displacement, how can folklorists’ attention to the everyday and the emplaced assist not only in documenting community responses, but in actively creating vibrant futures? (Noyes 2016; Hilliard 2022)
Conference participants might consider these questions as they plan their proposals:
- How do individuals and groups reckon with change, whether violent disruption or longstanding shift?
- What can survival, recovery, regeneration, and growth look like, and what kinds of skills and vision does this work require?
- When physical spaces are transformed or made inaccessible, how do groups retain a sense of cohesion in old places and in new ones?
- How do people deal with disruptions that are unimaginable?
- What are the risks and outcomes when people emphasize a persistence that is resistant to change?
We especially invite submissions that offer perspectives on and approaches to the roles of place-based or embodied knowledges, resistance, care, creativity, celebration, and collaboration as people work to manage disruption and uncertainty.
INTERSECTIONS OF PLACE AND THEME
Asheville, North Carolina, offers a powerful setting for the 2026 Annual Meeting. A city that faced catastrophic loss during Tropical Storm Helene and has since emerged as a hub of culture-driven regeneration, Asheville is part of a broader Appalachian region that historically leans into creativity, making do, and mutual aid during times of upheaval. Locals responded to the storm’s aftermath not only with emergency relief, but by using expressive culture to strengthen coalitions. This conference will recognize and uplift that model, offering a national platform for artists, educators, and tradition bearers to share, reflect, and collaborate.
In Appalachia, the work of rooting has always been necessary. Communities have persisted despite the exploitation of extractive industries, related land theft and forced outmigration, and popular devaluations of mountain lifeways. Today, new forms of displacement compound historical ones: flooding associated with climate change repeatedly washes away structures and landscapes; immigration enforcement actions uproot populations and heighten fears; the migration of social life to digital spaces shifts how people understand community and practice locally grounded knowledges. But as Appalachia and our base in Asheville demonstrate, communities re-story themselves in the wake of disaster, telling new versions that honor loss while asserting survival and imagining growth beyond mere resilience or recovery.
References:
González-Martin, Rachel V. “White Traditioning and Bruja Epistemologies: Rebuilding the House of USAmerican Folklore Studies.” In Theorizing Folklore from the Margins: Critical and Ethical Approaches, ed. Solimar Otero and Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera, 22-41. Indiana University Press, 2021.
Hilliard, Emily. Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia. University of North Carolina Press, 2022.
Horigan, Kate Parker. “Critical Empathy: A Survivor’s Study of Disaster.” In We Are All Survivors: Verbal, Ritual, and Material Ways of Narrating Disaster and Recovery, ed. Carl Lindahl, Michael Dylan Foster and Kate Parker Horigan, 82-95. Indiana University Press, 2022.
Noyes, Dorothy. “Compromised Concepts in Rising Waters: Making the Folk Resilient.” In Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life, 410-437. Indiana University Press, 2016.
Richardson, Thomas Grant, Jon Kay, Maida Owens, and Tim Frandy. “‘Urgencies’ in the Field: Three Perspectives.”Journal of American Folklore, 136, no. 540 (2023): 181-195.