when we began to work in earnest on this issue of JAF, our first as an editorial collective, in the early Spring of 2025, we were at a bit of a loss. Every day there was more upsetting news. This is no hyperbole, as the inauguration of new US political leadership brought disturbing new directives or orders that made headlines in the United States and around the globe. The challenges have continued, with many directives and legislative acts seemingly aimed at the heart of our profession. In the United States, this has included the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and massive cuts to education and federal agencies, with immediate and ongoing consequences for many of our colleagues, students, and collaborators. The onslaught has also included crackdowns on campus protests and attacks on academic freedom. Faculty at universities in the United States are being disciplined and even fired for teaching topics such as the history of racism, class inequality, or the humanity of LGBTQ+ people. Awarded grants have been rescinded, public folklorists have lost their jobs, and the work of folklorists who partner with historically marginalized communities has been compromised. At the same time, we face the possibility that friends, colleagues, students, and community members might be taken into custody and then detained or deported outside of the United States with very little communication or warning. These events are playing out locally but are also enmeshed in the threats and realities of rising global tensions, economic and technological disruption, imperial ambitions, shifting historical alliances, and war.Given the magnitude of these numerous intersecting challenges, it would be irresponsible as editors of JAF, a critical forum for professional dialogue in our discipline, to simply ignore the gravity of our current political moment. Our collective work is entangled with these crises in myriad ways, which will invariably have enduring impacts—predictable, but currently unknowable—that will shape the future of the field. In these moments, it's worth taking stock of the nature of these overwhelming changes and consider carefully strategies to resist, navigate, and simply endure.We decided to start by doing one of the things that scholars do—write about it. As Michael Bell argues in this issue, our work and our scholarship matter a great deal, both as ways to create, save, and share knowledge with our peers and to archive this historical moment in service of our discipline. We sent a call out to folklorists around the world to speak to the theme of “Crisis and Action,” and the response was so great that we have to publish the essays across two issues. The perspectives, ideas, and calls to action included in this themed forum represent a collective putting together of heads to imagine ways to keep going, even if what we are going into is a future that looks much different from the one we might have envisioned.In developing the theme for this forum, we considered several variations, including an early focus on “Crisis and Hope” as an attempt to offer light during what is a very dark time. We decided on “Crisis and Action” because we realized that we could neither guarantee nor require hope. Instead, we wanted to encourage deliberate reflection on strategic action, of which hope is sometimes a crucial component. The writers and thinkers whose essays appear in this issue and the next are at different stages in their varied careers, from early-career graduate students in folklore studies to veteran folklorists with an eye toward a longer history. Yet they all find power and purpose, and action and hope in the work of folklore and folklorists. Although the anxiety, fear, and overwhelm are real and palpable, we share in the conviction that together we can—and must—take care of each other, that folklorists have tools that are valuable in finding a path forward, that dark times are sometimes important in the building of better futures, and that there is still perhaps reason to hope, to start doing the work, and to build anew with even bolder designs.In times of crisis, the act of collective reflection and debate becomes not only a scholarly pursuit but also a vital mode of resilience. By embracing these dialogues, we want to illustrate with this Perspectives forum how folklorists and others can transform uncertainty into a springboard for action and imagination toward more just and sustainable futures.
JAF Editorial Collective (Thu,) studied this question.