What Folklorists Do: Professional Possibilities in Folklore Studies

Abstract

We are well aware that the humanities are in crisis. From disappearing tenure lines to low employment rates, students pursuing graduate education must now entertain alternative career possibilities (e.g., alt-ac), in the shape of public humanities, digital humanities, cultural resource management, consulting, and other adjacent professional tracks. Timothy Lloyd's edited collection What Folklorists Do: Professional Possibilities in Folklore Studies responds to this reality, showing how the field of folklore specifically participates in and contributes to broader conversations about social injustice, environment, science, place, culture, management, and other pressing topics.The book is a collection of short essays, written in a conversational and accessible language. It is organized into four thematic sections: research and teaching; leading and managing; communicating and curating; and advocating and partnering. Even though largely limited to the United States and acknowledging the limitations of this perspective, the book and its 76 contributors provide insight into a broad array of professional contexts that benefit from folkloric skill sets, from education (university, community college, and secondary school) to museums and archives, administration, and the public sphere. The mere collection of such a large number of contributions is a significant accomplishment in itself and a testament to the goals and ethics of folklore studies.Broadly, the authors argue that folklore, as a discipline rooted in active listening, has much to offer our tumultuous world. From social and environmental crises to science and policy, the skills that folklore promotes remain crucial to our survival in a post-pandemic world. The core reason is folklore's reliance upon fieldwork: professional folklorists do not merely extract information; they also develop relationships with communities, including friendship, trust and rapport, honesty about bias, and empathy. As Danille Christensen poignantly articulates, folklorists aim to “host and amplify rather than to bridge and translate” (p. 26). And this is the crucial distinction that separates folklore from other humanities fields that employ interviewing techniques. Folklorists, in other words, are honest and intentionally reflective about who they are, where they come from, and how they change as a result of their research encounters.As a newcomer to the field—I am an architectural historian who became exposed to folklore through the Archie Green Fellowship at the Library of Congress—What Folklorists Do brings some fresh questions and perspectives. The first section on research and teaching considers the ethics of fieldwork, pushing against the popular assumption that scholarship must always be objective and absent of any bias. Instead, the contributors to this volume argue that honest interpersonal relationships are the bread and butter of good folklore. Tom Mould, for example, offers a friendship model that does not glamorize the outsider status of the researcher, but encourages the creation of strong and meaningful bonds between researchers and their collaborators. Sheila Bock agrees, noting that “the best and most fulfilling work grows out of sustained relationships with people and the respect, trust, vulnerability, reciprocity, and friendship those relationships can engender” (p. 10). In short, researchers must feel responsibility not to their projects, nor departments, nor funding institutions, but first and foremost to the people they work with.The following section on leading and managing likewise applies a folkloric take on categories that do not typically appear in conventional scholarship, but obviously benefit from a humanities perspective. From directing departments to government agencies, the section sheds light on how to think differently about engagement with different types of publics and how to take responsibility for organizational action. Michael Ann Williams helpfully brings a folkloric sensibility to rethink the category of leadership itself, noting that leadership is “an act of taking responsibility,” ultimately a kind of performance (p. 64). Folklore's approaches to the performance of expertise is especially meaningful in the context of the COVID pandemic.Communicating and curating are two professional fields that lend themselves most obviously to folklore and its mode of deep listening. But even connections that are long established and refined need rethinking in these times of crisis. Carrie Hertz articulates that we must ask questions not only about how to display or exhibit, or whose stories should be told, but that the concept of the museum itself must be destabilized. And we must come to terms that “museums will always be decolonizing” (p. 121). Jon Kay likewise encourages scholars to develop a clear agenda that does not mean pleasing everyone but instead, standing up for particular ideals and convictions. In that vein, scores of museums and institutions have been revising their mission statements in order to clearly identify values and purpose. Folkloric strategies clearly help professionals outside of academia to engage with these challenges in meaningful ways.The final section of the book presents the most diverse set of professional contexts in which folkloric approaches thrive, from science policy to historic preservation. Collected under the broader umbrella term of advocating and partnering, the section is perhaps most helpful for graduate students or humanities professionals who are interested in switching to another career field. I myself was surprised to discover the different types of consulting work that folklorists do, from interviewing communities about their experiences of environmental change to documenting the use of particular coding tools so future software engineers understand how technologies evolved. And this work is not merely about documenting labor, but also shaping technology and policy—professional moves that have been kept to the sidelines of academia. Diane E. Goldstein elucidates that “humanities scholars have also generally been reluctant to get involved in policy making, perhaps feeling that our role is to critique power structures rather than support them” (p. 218). As our professional and social worlds change dramatically in the coming years, it is important to imagine how folklorists might critique and engage with policy moving forward.As any thought-provoking text, What Folklorists Do raises many questions. First, how would a more transnational collection of scholars discuss the relevance of folklore to research and teaching, leading and managing, communicating and curating, and advocating and partnering? How would they describe the value of folklore-related skills and sensibilities? Likewise important for the field at large is asking what folklorists don't do. In what areas and fields could folklore as a discipline grow? How could it adjust to and accommodate the different demands that the employment sector puts on recent graduates? Clearly, What Folklorists Do identifies an important and pressing conversation that will undoubtedly engage scores of researchers from academic, public, and government sectors. It is a crucial topic that will necessitate reimagining as we find ourselves in new phases of post-pandemic life and work.