Call and Response: Stories, Movements, and the Living Traditions We Carry

Joint Conference of the Oral History Association and the American Folklore Society

November 3-6, 2027 | Chicago, Illinois

The Oral History Association and the American Folklore Society invite proposals for a joint conference exploring the relationships among story, memory, movement, tradition, and collective life.

Our theme, “Call and Response: Stories, Movements, and the Living Traditions We Carry,” asks us to think about storytelling not simply as the preservation of what has been, but as an ongoing exchange: between generations, communities, places, bodies, archives, researchers, performers, and audiences. A call may be answered, transformed, resisted, remembered, or carried forward. A story may travel across borders and families, change in the telling, or gather new meanings in response to changing circumstances.

Chicago offers a particularly rich setting for these conversations. A city shaped by migration, Indigenous presence, racial and ethnic community formation, labor and social movements, neighborhood traditions, music, foodways, performance, religious practice, and continual movement of people and ideas, Chicago invites us to consider how traditions are made and remade in relation to place. The city is also a landscape of archives and counter-archives, remembered and contested histories, vernacular expression, and living communities whose stories continue to shape the places they inhabit.

We invite scholars, practitioners, artists, community historians, tradition bearers, archivists, educators, students, activists, curators, filmmakers, ethnographers, oral historians, folklorists, and others to consider what it means to call, to respond, and to carry.

Call and Response

The phrase “call and response” evokes musical and performative traditions, but its implications extend far beyond performance. It can describe the relationship between interviewer and narrator, ancestor and descendant, archive and community, storyteller and audience, researcher and collaborator, or past and present.

What happens when one generation calls upon another to remember? How do communities respond when their histories have been ignored, misrepresented, or forgotten? What responsibilities emerge when we inherit stories that are unfinished, contested, painful, or sacred? And how do people respond creatively when inherited traditions encounter new technologies, new places, new political realities, or new audiences?

We welcome proposals that engage these questions through oral history, folklore, folklife, ethnography, performance, material culture, public history, cultural studies, and related fields.

Possible areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to:

Stories in motion: migration, diaspora, displacement, borders, pilgrimage, travel, exile, and the movement of stories across places and generations.
Living traditions: how traditions change, persist, disappear, reemerge, and acquire new meanings.
Intergenerational exchange: inheritance, transmission, teaching, apprenticeship, family memory, and the relationships between elders, youth, and future generations.
Movement and movements: stories of labor, civil rights, racial justice, Indigenous sovereignty, migration, feminism, LGBTQ+ communities, disability justice, environmental activism, and other social movements.
Chicago stories: neighborhood histories, local traditions, community archives, vernacular culture, music, foodways, religious practices, festivals, architecture, and the many cultural worlds of Chicago and the Great Lakes region.
Counter-stories and contested histories: whose stories are preserved, whose are excluded, and how communities respond to dominant narratives.
Voice, listening, and silence: the ethics and practices of interviewing, witnessing, listening, recording, and representing lived experience.
Archives and living memory: relationships between archival collections and community memory, including questions of access, ownership, stewardship, repatriation, and repair.
Material and embodied traditions: clothing, crafts, objects, landscapes, architecture, food, gesture, dance, ritual, and other forms through which communities carry knowledge.
Music and performance: call-and-response traditions, vernacular performance, popular culture, participatory arts, and the ways performance creates relationships among past, present, and future.
Digital traditions: social media, digital archives, podcasts, online communities, memes, artificial intelligence, and emerging technologies as sites of storytelling and cultural transmission.
Restorying and reimagining: reclaiming, revising, refashioning, or challenging inherited narratives.
Methods and ethics: collaborative research, community-engaged scholarship, participatory methods, decolonial approaches, and the responsibilities of researchers working with living communities.
Stories of place: how people remember, claim, lose, remake, and imagine places through narrative and tradition.
Teaching and learning: bringing oral history, folklore, and community knowledge into classrooms, museums, archives, and public programs.
Forms of response: artistic, scholarly, political, ceremonial, humorous, musical, material, and everyday responses to stories and histories.
The future of tradition: what communities choose to carry forward, what they transform, what they leave behind, and what new traditions they create.

Beyond the Traditional Panel

We especially welcome proposals that experiment with the forms through which knowledge is shared. In addition to individual papers and traditional panels, we encourage proposals for:

Roundtables and facilitated conversations
Workshops and skill-sharing sessions
Performances and demonstrations
Exhibitions and object-centered presentations
Film and documentary screenings
Digital and multimedia projects
Story circles and participatory sessions
Interactive and experiential formats
Creative and practice-based work

We welcome proposals that cross disciplinary, institutional, and methodological boundaries. We particularly encourage diverse collaborations that represent the many vibrant ways this work happens both in, and beyond, conventional academic settings.

Who Should Submit?

We invite participation from scholars and practitioners at all career stages and from a wide range of fields and communities. Proposals are welcome from academics, independent researchers, public folklorists, public historians,,community historians, activists, artists, tradition bearers, archivists, librarians, museum and cultural workers, educators, students, filmmakers, ethnographers, public historians, and others whose work engages with oral history, folklore, folklife, memory, narrative, tradition, or related areas.

You do not need to work within a single discipline—or within an academic institution—to participate. We encourage proposals that bring different forms of expertise into conversation.

What Are We Carrying?

At its heart, this conference asks us to consider the reciprocal nature of cultural transmission. We inherit stories, but we also alter them. We receive traditions, but we also perform them. We listen to voices from the past while responding to the needs of the present. And what we choose to carry may shape what becomes possible for those who come after us.

What calls to us? Who answers? What do we carry forward, and what do we transform along the way?

We invite you to join us in Chicago in November 2027 for a conversation across oral history and folklore—and across the many communities, practices, disciplines, and traditions that make stories living things.

Questions? Feel free to email the Joint Conference Committee