AFS Invites You to Participate in Our 2021 Annual Meeting

We’re pleased to invite you to participate in the 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society!

This year, participation will be easier than ever, since we’ll be offering both virtual and in-person sessions. We’ve posted our call for proposals for those who would like to present, but we invite you all to engage in some manner, whether or not you are on the program.

Ironically, Covid-19 has opened a new door, so you can interact with your colleagues and connect with recent work in our field, even if you can’t travel. We hope that many of you who have found it difficult to attend our meetings in the past will find an opportunity to re-engage in some of the many live or recorded virtual sessions that will be offered this year.

Of course, we’re all excited by the promise of meeting again in-person, and we look forward to welcoming you to Harrisburg! By fall, we hope that a successful vaccination campaign will make it safe for many of us to gather for the unmediated (but masked) face-to-face interaction that we’ve been missing. To that end, the in-person sessions will foster the social and professional networking that is best accomplished in person.

You should know, though, that we have limited meeting space this year, with fewer meeting rooms than usual, and we are still facing the possibility of social distancing in the fall. For this reason, during proposal review, we will prioritize sessions that foster or depend on in-person interaction.

As a rule, we’ll plan to maximize the affordances that each mode delivers best, while making sure that each mode is, taken individually, a satisfying experience with a range of keynote and general sessions, including research presentations, discussion of timely topics in our field, and opportunities for social and professional engagement.

Bear in mind, too, that we will offer these two meeting modes separately, with sessions that will take place either entirely in-person or entirely virtual. If you are planning to propose a panel with some virtual presenters, then the entire panel should be offered virtually. Either way, we’re switching to a 90-minute panel duration by default, so please prepare proposals accordingly. You can find the rationale for these decisions in our FAQ.

Questions? We bet you have some! Please start by reviewing our new Policies and FAQ, then plan to join us for an information session on either April 6, at 11:00 am Eastern Time, or April 20 at 2:00 pm Eastern. We’ll meet in Zoom to discuss your questions about our meeting planning and proposal review processes. And, of course, you don’t have to wait until then; contact us at [email protected] at any time.AFS Invites You to Participate in Our 2021 Annual Meeting