Mission Statement
The NEWFOLK@AFS Section of the
American Folklore Society

In 1997, a small band of folklorists formed the online community New Directions In Folklore (NEWFOLK) to push the envelope of folklore scholarship, particularly in the exploration of contemporary culture. Over the years since it began, NEWFOLK has grown both in its membership and in its impact on the scholarly community.

NEWFOLK scholars are dedicated to cutting edge, innovative work grounded in rigorous methods drawn from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives and applied to projects of significance, relevance and impact. Through its email list, journal (New Directions In Folklore, formerly The Impromptu Journal) and other online resources, NEWFOLK has fostered scholarly interest in:

• emergent communities creating folklore or using traditional folklore as a source of community building;
• established communities using emergent or traditional folklore in new and unexpected ways, to create or cope with change;
• emergent means of disseminating folklore within groups, in particular, computer mediated communication as a medium of centering dispersed communities both emergent and traditional;
• emergent applications of folklore scholarship, across a wide variety of cutting edge approaches.

While rejecting the narrow strictures sometimes put on folklore itself, NEWFOLK embraces the methods and theories of the field, and encourages new theories and methods that integrate profitably with established folkloristics. We do not reject our history, we merely prefer not to live in it. For these reasons, Newfolk has petitioned the Executive Board of the American Folklore Society to create a NEWFOLK@AFS section of the society.