2026 Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society

Community Persistence: Reckoning with Change, Imagining Futures

Persistence and rooting can take many forms. Displaced communities carry their stories, songs, foodways, craft traditions, and visions with them. Folklore as therapy, as labor, and as social production speaks to tradition’s value in communities navigating constant displacement. Material culture becomes both anchor and archive—quilts, instruments, tools, and buildings hold memory and offer continuity. Digital spaces become sites of diasporic connection, organizing, and cultural transmission, even as they raise questions about authenticity, access, and the commodification of community narratives. As folklorists, oral historians, artists, ethnomusicologists, and cultural workers know, stories do more than record—they restore, resist, and reimagine, even as they sometimes flatten out complexities. Counter-narratives challenge dominant stories about who belongs and what futures are possible in changing communities. The act of staying, too, is persistence: rebuilding in burned-over zones, continuing to speak marginalized languages, maintaining farms and gardens on increasingly precarious land. We welcome engagement with all these modes of expression and practice.