Salons 4: Sustainabilities

The “Sustainabilities” salons, organized by the Fellows of the American Folklore Society, drew together folklorists from the United States, Europe, and Asia, who were interested in frameworks for the study and stewardship of culture at the nexus of economy, ecology, nature, and the multi-species ethnographic and ontological turn. Conversations highlighted the continuing friction between public environmental policies grounded in Western instrumental, anthropocentric attitudes toward nature, and deeply relational values espoused by Indigenous and environmental justice communities, and by the growing numbers of climate refugees and host communities—urban and rural—with whom folklorists and heritage scholars are increasingly engaged. Exploring what is most needed from folklorists in a time of global environmental instability, participants identified ways to build on solid foundations developed over decades of public folklore's place-based community engagement.