Independent Folklorists Section of the American Folklore Society
Public sector folklore organizations are increasingly relying on independent folklore consultants to provide services ranging from fieldwork to strategic planning. Contracts, expectations, services, and remuneration vary greatly. The growth in this type of work indicates a need for a careful examination and discussion of standards and practices in work, products, pay, etc. Independent folklorists were presenting panels and forums at AFS on contract folklore work as early as 1985. In 1998 we began to meet annually as an interest group of the Public Programs Section. It became clear that the field of independent consulting folklorists is growing, and that the issues and concerns of this group are particular to small businesses and/or sole contractors. At the 2000 AFS meeting in Columbus, Ohio, the group voted to seek section status and held our first official section meeting in October 2001 at the AFS meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.
Our section provides a professional cohort to independent folklorists. We have a regular on-line discussion group through which we network, discuss issues and concerns of mutual interest, and provide each other with information regarding upcoming short-term jobs and contracts. We are currently working towards a public statement of ethics, standards, and practices in contract folklore. We produce panels and paper sessions at AFS and state and regional folklore meetings on aspects of independent folklore. We also provide workshops on the business aspects of contract folklore for independent folklorists and those interested in becoming contract folklorists.
We work with folklorists in state and federal agencies to establish fair compensation and work practice standards.
2009-2010 Senior Co-Convener
2009-2010 Junior Co-Convener
Convener History
Karen Miller 2008-2009
Sue Eleuterio 2007-2009
Laura Marcus 2005-2007
Jens Lund 2004-2006
Andrea Graham 2003-2005
Janet Gilmore 2002-2004
Eleanor Wachs 2001-2003
Patricia Wells 2000-2002
To join the Independent Folklorists listserv, Ind-Folk on Yahoo! Groups,
go to groups.yahoo.com/group/Ind_Folk/ and click on "Join This Group."
Consulting News from AFS Independent Folklorists Section Members:
Dyann Arthur arthur@musicboxproject.org
Dyann Arthur, musician and folklorist, is founder of MusicBox Project, a non-profit corporation whose mission it is to document and preserve our musical history while advancing music education and occupational avenues of creation and performance. Current project: a collection of oral histories and performances of women instrumentalists (not vocalists per say) in traditional genres of American Roots Music, especially those with familial and geographic ties to the tradition. 2010 Fieldwork will explore and document educational and performance gender inequalities, and creative strategies of performers/song writers. Study will highlight adaptive methods used in overcoming obstacles to participation and skill development within traditional cultures. Documented performances will seek to reveal their unique contributions to the cache of developing twenty first century traditions and dissemination of culture on the World Wide Web. This interdisciplinary study will feature performances on MusicBox Project�s YouTube Channel throughout the fieldwork, with film documentary to follow.
Elena Bradunas (Kaneohe, Hawaii) elena@lava.net
46-420 Haiku Plantations Dr.; Kaneohe, Hawaii 96744; 808.247.6037; cell, 808.342.3745
Elena is an independent folklorist living in Hawaii. Her recent work includes traveling to Lithuania and working with folklorists there in developing various public programs.
Teri F. Brewer (Wales and California) tfb@brewerwells.org
I work as a freelance consultant, field ethnographer, and interpretive trainer in the UK and the USA. Recently I have worked as Research Coordinator for a UK based contribution to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival 2007 and am involved in another project for the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage to survey research resources for a future festival program on Wales which is in planning. I continue to develop field schools and study tours, having offered a program on cultural landscape interpretation in California this past year with several future programs in planning. I offer folklore, anthropology and research methods courses through several universities. Patricia Wells and I established Brewer Wells & Associates Cultural Resource Services in 2005 to formalize some of our long term occasional collaboration on research and consulting projects. We have offered professional development workshops in cultural interpretation individually and together this year and have plans to expand to further types of collaboration in the future.
Lisa Duskin-Goede (Logan, Utah) duskingoede@comcast.net
Lisa recently completed documentation of a year in the life of a Southeastern Idaho cattle rancher, and is expanding her research about ranching in Idaho and Wyoming for public programming. Since 2002, her research, photography and writing about historic barns of the Bear River Heritage Area resulted in two published guidebooks, and an exhibit at the American West Heritage Center. She presents a slide show and talks about this research, and is working on developing K-12 materials about barns and the agricultural lifestyle connection. In 2003, she also participated with a team of folklorists to conduct a cultural survey in Southeastern Idaho for the Bear River Heritage Area. In 2006, she acted as editor for a local oral history project, served on the ethics committee at a local nursing center and taught cultural sensitivity workshops there. She is in the process of preparing her oral history interviews for archival inclusion at Utah State University Special Collections and producing products for the families she has come to know in her fieldwork. She is an avid fieldworker, delving into all aspects of the cultural lifestyle of Western land users, including issues of land and resource management that are challenged in the continuation of this tradition. She holds a Masters in Folklore from Utah State University.
Susan Eleuterio (Metro Chicago, northwest Indiana) suee1@juno.com
219.902.1831
Susan Eleuterio holds an MA in American Folk Culture from the Cooperstown Graduate Program (SUNY/Oneonta) and a BA in English/Education from the University of Delaware. She is the author of Irish American Material Culture: A Directory of Collections, Sites and Festivals in the United States and Canada (Greenwood Press: 1988). She has conducted fieldwork and developed public programs including exhibits, performances, folk arts and oral history workshops and residencies in museums and schools, and professional development programs for teachers and artists for organizations in New York, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Louisiana, and Missouri as well as for the Southern Arts Federation. She formerly served as the Director of Ethnic and Folk Arts, Literature and Presenters Programs for the Illinois Arts Council. She also co-developed a non-profit agency, GRANTS Inc. that provides technical assistance, grant writing classes and programs to build organizational capacity for Northwest Indiana non-profit agencies.
Her current projects include conducting field and historical research as a basis for K-12 curriculum materials and a traveling exhibit on Mexican-American Folkloric and Irish-American Step-Dance dance costume in the Midwest. She is working on an ethnographic memoir on cultural identity: working title “Just An Average American White Girl” subtitle: “When Your Cultural Identity Chooses You and When You Choose Your Cultural Identity” and is co-creating a new non-profit to research, preserve, and present traditional and folk culture of the Chicago metropolitan area including Northwest Indiana. She is also the Project Director for a curriculum on Missouri Folk Arts for the Missouri Folk Arts Program.
Janet Gilmore (Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin) jgilmore@wisc.edu
Janet is on leave from the idylls of independent work, joining the Folklore Program and Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she attempts to integrate her experience as an independent with teaching and academic research (see http://www.la.wisc.edu/people/faculty.htm#jgilmore). She tries to inspire younger generations through hybrid Folklore and Historic Preservation/Cultural Resource classes that require ethnographic documentation and public production work. She has not forsaken contract work or concerns, and continues to work with Upper Midwestern organizations like the Chippewa Valley Museum in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, which is now developing exhibits and programming on the region’s new immigrants. She’s been pleased to match field schools, classwork, archiving, and students with these projects. Since 2002, she has led the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures team in preparing searchable on-line finding aids for the Upper Midwest’s publicly-funded folk arts project collections. See http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/WIArchives.CSUMC.
Eren Giray (Columbus, Ohio) egiray@columbus.rr.com
Eren Giray is an international researcher, teacher and writer who has conducted several research projects in Africa, Turkey, and among immigrant groups in the midwestern U.S. She is an accomplished fieldworker and translator (Turkish/French/Jula to English) and has published several articles and a collection of West African Jula folktales selected as a PAFS (Publication of the American Folklore Society). She has provided teacher training workshops and summer institutes on African and Middle Eastern oral and written literature and culture and served as a consultant for NEH Summer Institutes. She has served as Outreach Coordinator for the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana Center for African Studies as a liaison between the public schools and community. She has curated exhibits, and served as a commentator for African and Turkish films and was recently interviewed for the U.S. tour of the Whirling Dervishes of
Rumi sponsored by the Scioto Educational Foundation. She wrote the history of the Turkish American Association of Columbus Ohio (TAACO) for their website. Eren is currently working on an oral history of a late Ottoman family's emigration from Salonica to Istanbul in the early 20th Century. She is available for short and long term collection projects, project design and conceptualization, writing reports and synopses on topics of traditional culture, the immigrant experience, interpretation of storytelling and legend narratives, as well as folk belief and personal experience narratives as they relate to community identity in the face of social transformation.
Andrea Graham (Pocatello, Idaho) andymeg@earthlink.net
Andrea has served as the contract Traditional Arts Coordinator for the South Dakota Arts Council since 2001, where she manages an apprenticeship program and has been curating a biennial series of exhibits. She has conducted fieldwork and planning for two fledgling heritage areas—the Great Basin Heritage Area in Utah and Nevada, which received federal designation in 2006, and the Bear River Heritage Area in Idaho and Utah. Other recent projects include fieldwork and consulting with a local arts council in Humboldt County, California, to help them increase services to traditional artists; editing the folklife section for Nevada Humanities’ Online Nevada Encyclopedia; coordinating a project to train Midwestern tribal college instructors in folklore and fieldwork so they can develop courses at their institutions; conducting folklife surveys in south central Idaho and eastern Wyoming; teaching a four-day folklife field school sponsored by the Idaho Commission on the Arts; and coordinating the Folk Arts Peer Group sessions at the 2005 NASAA conference in Boise. Andrea also serves as a commissioner for the Idaho Commission on the Arts.
Joe Hickerson (Takoma Park, Maryland) jhick@starpower.net
43 Philadelphia Avenue; Takoma Park, MD 20912; 301.933.4093; www.joehickerson.com
Over the past fifty-plus years, Joe Hickerson has performed over a thousand times throughout the U.S.A. and in Canada, Finland, and Ukraine. His repertoire includes a vast array of folksongs and allied forms in the English language, many with choruses. Pete Seeger has called him "a great songleader." He calls himself a "vintage pre-plugged paleo-acoustic folksinger." In 1960 he wrote the 4th and 5th verses of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." He has recordings on the Folk-Legacy and Folkways labels, ranging from 1957 to 2003. His concerts are guaranteed to "Drive Dull Care Away." Joe also has a career as folklorist, ethnomusicologist, archivist, and librarian; for 35 years (1963-1998) he was Librarian and Director of the Archive of Folk Song/Culture at the Library of Congress. He lectures and writes on a variety of folk music topics, and is available for song and copyright researches. And he now coordinates the "Songfinder" column for Sing Out! magazine. Contact him directly for hiring information and an annotated list of recordings.
Laurel Horton (Seneca, SC) laurel@kalmiaresearch.net
Laurel Horton (Kalmia Research) has worked as an independent folklorist since 1980 and is recognized internationally for her research and publications on quiltmaking traditions. Her book, Mary Black's Family Quilts: Memory and Meaning in Everyday Life (University of South Carolina Press, 2005), sets a new standard for the analysis of historical quilts as evidence of the material behavior within family and community. Laurel presents public programs and serves as a consultant to museums and other organizations for research, exhibitions, and publications on historic and contemporary quilts.
Richard Joltes djoltes@criticalenquiry.org
Richard Joltes is a writer and researcher who works primarily at the intersection between folklore and history, examining the manner in which elements of folklore and legend become integrated into popular consciousness (and accepted history) over time. His work includes articles on treasure hunting tales, urban legends, and the acceptance of early myths about American history into the historical record. Recent projects have included articles about treasure hunting manias in New England following the Revolutionary War, and an upcoming piece on the myth of North America as an "unsettled wilderness" prior to the arrival of Europeans.
Jens Lund (Olympia, Washington) jenslund@earthlink.net & Jens.Lund@parks.wa.gov
Home: 360.943.2834; Cell: 360.561.0672; Parks office: 360.902.8526
Jens has been an independent folklore researcher for hire from his first contract for the Smithsonian’s Festival of American Folklife in the fall of 1975, except for six years as the director of the Washington State Folklife Council and two years as outreach faculty for Indiana University’s Indiana Communities Project. Since 2004, Jens has been Program Manager of Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission’s Folk and Traditional Arts in the Parks Program. Jens’s Indiana University doctoral dissertation in folklore and American Studies (published by University Press of Kentucky as Flatheads and Spooneys) is derived from early contract fieldwork in the lower Midwest. Jens has conducted fieldwork projects in communities in eighteen states, from Staten Island, New York, to the Aleutians. Jens helped organize the first Cowboy Poetry Gathering, in Elko, Nevada, the first logger poetry gatherings in Washington, and the first City Lore People’s Poetry Gathering in New York City. Since 1984, he has worked primarily in the West. From 1996 through 2004, he developed six of the first folklore audio tours, the Washington Heritage Audio Tours. Apart from his state parks work, he has lately been moonlighting by doing fieldwork with Northwest Indian woodcarvers for the Longhouse Educational and Cultural Center. In 2004, his colleagues awarded him the Benjamin A. Botkin Prize for outstanding achievement in public folklore.
Bill Mansfield (Tampa, Florida) wtmansfield@hotmail.com
Bill Mansfield moved to Tampa last year, after completing the National Park Service’s Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project. In 2005 he conducted an oral history on free trade legislation and the Florida citrus industry for the University of South Florida’s Globalization Research Center. He interviewed orange growers, state agricultural officials and the leaders of agricultural organizations about their efforts to affect trade legislation. Currently Mansfield is researching agricultural traditions for Florida’s Folklife Program. In January he will use his folklore research skills to explore changing land use policies for USF’s Patel Center for Global Solutions. He will interview farmers and developers about changing land use practices in central Florida.
Laura R. Marcus (Santa Fe, New Mexico) lauraruth@earthlink.net
Laura is an independent folklorist, writer, and consultant specializing in cultural arts and heritage fieldwork. Currently, she is collaborating with the Institute for Cultural Partnerships (ICP) on the national project, Building Cultural Bridges. In conjunction with the project, she compiled and edited the volume, The Art of Community; Creativity at the Crossroads of Immigrant Cultures and Social Services which, along with community-based workshops and conference panels, seeks to encourage interdisciplinary networks of support for newcomer arts and heritage. Other current and recent projects include: researching and writing a Fiber Arts Trail Guide for a New Mexico Arts rural economic development initiative; contract work for the Western Folklife Center; and developing portfolios of rural communities for Renewing the Countryside. Recent publications include “The Best of Everything: A Collaborative Approach to Refugee and Immigrant Traditional Arts,” which appeared in the Fall-Winter 2006 issue of Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore, and an entry on Navajo folklore for the Greenwood Encyclopedia of World Folklore. Formerly, she served as the founding director of the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization Arts for New Immigrants Program in Portland, Oregon and as Program Associate for the Fund for Folk Culture, and has worked for the state folk arts programs of Colorado and Oregon. Other professional experience includes research on Navajo trading and art, teaching folklore and ethnography-related courses, facilitating creative writing workshops in underserved communities, as well as diverse publications, exhibits and presentations.
Gwen Meister (Lincoln, Nebraska) plainsculture@inebraska.com
www.nefolklife.org
Gwen is the Executive Director of the Nebraska Folklife Network, Inc. (NFN), a nonprofit organization that serves as the state folklife program of Nebraska. The NFN works with the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Humanities Council to produce educational materials for Nebraska K-12 schools on folklife and traditional arts. Gwen also consults through her business, Plains Cultural Resources. She has directed oral history projects focusing on Mexican Americans, Germans from Russia, occupational folklore, and agriculture for organizations ranging from economic development districts to museums and historical societies. She delivers folklife and oral history training workshops for the American Folklife Center Veterans History Project in Nebraska and surrounding states. She holds a masters degree in cultural anthropology with an emphasis on folklore from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Jo Radner (Lovell, Maine) jradner@american.edu
www.joradner.com
Jo’s work, principally in northern New England, combines oral history, folklore fieldwork, storytelling, and school residencies. Funded by the Maine Humanities Council, she presents workshops throughout the state of Maine on the art of oral history. Her own oral history work serves regional historical societies and often culminates in a storytelling performance as well as archival material. Recently she created Burnt into Memory: The Story of the Brownfield Fire, an hour-long performance based on local accounts of a 1947 wildfire. She teaches interviewing and community folklore research in schools and coordinates intergenerational projects. She is also finishing a book on the creation and performance of handwritten literary “newspapers” in nineteenth-century New England.
Millie Rahn (Watertown [metro-Boston], Massachusetts) club47@aol.com
Millie's current projects include curating several festivals--material culture for the Lowell Folk Festival, which continues to includ New England master artists in various genres; foodways for the American Folk Festival in Bangor, Maine; and oral histories and foodways of the maritime industry for the Working Waterfront Festival in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In 2005 she curated traditional arts for Boston's "Ahts" Festival and a traditional music series for the City of Boston as part of its 375th anniversary celebrations; and presented
for the National Folk Festival and smaller regional events. Currently she is working with the Hudson Museum at the University of Maine and the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance to document on video the material culture of the four Indian tribes in Maine. She also teaches foodways and historical ethnography at Plymouth State University’s Graduate Heritage Studies Program in New Hampshire and will be introducing a course on producing local festivals in summer 2007. She was a presenter at the 2005 NASAA meeting in Boise about foodways projects in Maine, Massachusetts, and Missouri, and had an article in the winter 2006 issue of the Journal of American Folklore about how folklorists work outside conventional folklife programs, using foodways projects as case studies. She continues to serve as project folklorist for the Passim Cultural Center's New England Folk Music Archive Project and is on the board of the North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance, where she coordinates the Lifetime Achievement Awards.
Amber Ridington (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) amber@amberridington.com
Since 2001, Amber has worked as an independent folklorist collaborating with Aboriginal and community groups in Kentucky, Alaska and British Columbia, Canada, to fund, design, produce and facilitate museum exhibits, new media projects and documentary videos that conserve heritage and showcase cultural landscapes through oral history. For Amber�s most recent collaborative project, an online exhibition entitled Dane Wajich Dane-zaa Stories and Song, hosted by the Virtual Museum of Canada (www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/Danewajich), she, and co-curator Kate Hennessy, received the 2008 Jean Rouch Award from the Society for Visual Anthropology for participatory filmmaking and innovations in media communication. In addition to her independent consulting work Amber is a doctoral candidate in folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Find more about Amber and her work at www.amberridington.com
Alicia J. Rouverol (Santa Rosa, California) ajrouver@earthlink.net
Alicia has recently completed a life review project at a rural North Carolina prison, in which inmates performed their stories for at-risk youth. She is currently at work on a book based on the project. Remembering: Oral History Performance (MacMillan/Palgrave, 2005), edited by Della Pollock, features an article on this work. She also served as oral history project director, with folklorist Margie Ryan as interview team leader, on “Finding Marin,” part of the California Council for the Humanities’ statewide California Stories Initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation. In 2003-2004, in conjunction with Assistant Curator Bryson Strauss, she developed the Western Oral History Program for the Autry National Center: Museum of the American West, and consulted on the Vaquero Oral History Project, funded by the Fund for Folk Culture.
Josepha Sherman josherman@aol.com
Josepha Sherman is an Independent folklorist, as well as a writer who has published twelve folklore titles for August House, M.E. Sharpe, and others.
Richard Vidutis, PhD (Silver Spring, Maryland) culturalheritage@fastmail.fm
Richard Vidutis has worked as a contract consultant on over 80 research and documentation projects throughout the United States in the fields of Ethnography/Folklife, Museum Programming and Planning, and History (Cultural Resources Management, and Historic Preservation). His strengths lie in the areas of project management, fieldwork, material culture, and ethnicity.
This year, his work load has included research on Virginia's horse culture for the Smithsonian’s 2007 folklife festival, documentation of African-American churches in post-Katrina New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward for FEMA, interviewing Hershey, PA residents regarding social customs in the chocolate industry town for a local archives, and documentation on an African-American community as well as river front recreational structures affected by the building of a new bridge over the Ohio River between Indiana and Kentucky. Other work has produced inventories of tradition bearers for festivals, artifact collections for museum exhibitions, surveys of vernacular architectures, evaluations of community arts programs, thematic interpretations for community planning of affected cultural and historical resources, even National Register of Historic Places nominations. Some of the institutions served with folklife research include the Maryland Historical Society, Michigan State University Museum, Down Jersey Folklife Center, Pennsylvania Heritage Affairs Commission, Airmen Memorial Museum in Suitland, Maryland, Joshua Tree National Park, California, and a national survey of collections preservation status for the Institute of Museum and Library Services in Washington, DC, to name just a few.
His education includes a PhD (on Finnish farmsteads in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula) from the Folklore Institute, Indiana University, and the study of archiving at Wayne State University, Detroit, along with course work in museum preservation and conservation at Greenfield Village, Ford Museum, Dearborn. Also, he has had study and research scholarships to universities in Lithuania, Finland, Poland, and Minnesota. Richard is fluent in Lithuanian and still has limited facility with Polish, which he studied as a Slavics undergrad major.
Patricia Atkinson Wells (Murfreesboro, Tennessee) patriciaw@comcast.net
Patricia Atkinson Wells has been a professional folklorist, arts administrator, cultural consultant, writer, editor, and publications specialist for three decades. She has also maintained certifications and continuing education in non-profit management, outdoor education and resident camping, and most recently, as an interpretive guide and trainer with the National Association for Interpretation. All of these are people-centered activities that require patience, organization, creativity, and the ability to assess needs and propose solutions or recommend courses of action.
For the last ten years she has been involved in research and a variety of practical projects in the areas of cultural and heritage tourism. As a trainer and peer advisor, she has provided consulting and training programs to traditional artists, community groups, and folklore organizations in more than a dozen states. She is also active as a program and project evaluator and has sat on advisory and grants review panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and state arts councils or commissions in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and for the Southern Arts Federation in Atlanta, Georgia.
Wells has spoken and written on folklore and rural development, the implications of cultural diversity for achieving organizational goals, preserving and promoting cultural resources, the marketing of tradition, state supported traditional crafts programs, and cultural tourism initiatives. She is a partner in the cultural consulting groups Brewer Wells and Associates, with Dr. Teri F. Brewer, and Heritage Partnerships with Millie Rahn.
To join this American Folklore Society interest-group section, please visit the AFS membership page of this web site, where you will find both a secure online and a printable, mailable membership form. You need not be a member of the American Folklore Society to join its sections.