About the 2022 Exhibit
We believe that the examination of the research, praxes, methodologies, and perspectives of these BIPOC ancestor scholars can broaden and strengthen folklore studies, moving it toward a more equitable, antiracist, and decolonial practice. Our initiative seeks to intervene in the citational practices of our field in order to awaken, reassess, and expand consideration of the diverse approaches, conceptions, interpretations, legacies, sources, and praxes that could be applied in folklore studies. The ancestors we have profiled provide a window into the vast repertoires of scholarship and perspectives that could enrich and inform a folklore studies curricula grounded in antiracist and decolonized perspectives. As in the 2019 exhibition, we restricted ourselves to selecting scholars whose scholarship featured diversity within the United States and her territories, to represent the breadth of the focus of the AFS Cultural Diversity Committee (CDC).
As a standing committee of the AFS Executive Board, the CDC has been engaged in promoting diversity, inclusion, and equity concerns across the academic, community and national fronts. The work of the CDC continues to remain critical as we seek to engage equitably with local communities and shift the social justice lens inward to address questions about race and systemic privilege within our own Society.
The authors of the panels in this expanded exhibition represent a collaboration with over 50 current African American, Native American, Latinx, Asian American, and Native Hawaiian scholars from folklore studies and allied fields active in both public and academic arenas.
Accompanying these exhibitions, we have created:
- a section featuring Centers and Landscapes as sites generative for the study of BIPOC folklore scholarship
- extensive bibliographies linked to the panel for each featured ancestor in both exhibitions
- a 52 page guide booklet to the Notable Folklorist of Color exhibitions that will be distributed at the AFS annual meeting in Tulsa (2022) and will be available as a PDF on this website soon
- Roundtable discussions at the AFS Annual Meeting in Tulsa about the processes of creating the exhibitions and the significance of these BIPOC voices for folklore studies.