Call for Big Ideas: Propose Special Sessions for 2019 AFS Annual Meeting by Lorraine Cashman

We invite your ideas for "big idea" sessions for the 2019 AFS Annual Meeting in Baltimore. Which questions and concepts exercise us all as folklorists, regardless of our daily preoccupations, areas of concentration, or sphere of work? Which broader social questions can folklorists particularly address? The goal is to schedule a small number of big-tent conversations across the field that may serve to make folkloristic achievements more cumulative and folkloristic debates more consequential. Subject to revision, the plan is to schedule one or two AFS President-proposed sessions and two or three member-proposed sessions annually, depending on proposals.

Successful proposals will make the case for their topic as a critical issue for folklore studies itself and/or an issue of general scholarly and societal importance into which the work of folklorists might offer new insight. Preferred sessions will assemble, to the degree possible,

• Participants who have not yet conversed intensely with one another
• Perspectives from different zones of practice and professional involvement in the field, including earlier historical moments and non-US settings as well as the current range of US folkloristic engagements  
• Diversely situated and identified participants
• Diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives
• Diverse examples or case studies in genre, ethnographic setting, context of practice, etc. 

To have your panel considered under this rubric, email lcashman@indiana.edu by February 28 with a proposal, including a preliminary list of panel participants. AFS may provide assistance, as needed, to find additional participants to bring diverse perspectives to accepted sessions. Sessions not selected for the "big idea" designation may still be submitted for review through the regular proposal review process.

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