Salons 1: Mutual Engagement, Co-creation, and Yielding Authority for Representation: Strategies and Practices

Robert Baron is Assistant Professor of Practice in the Master of Arts in Cultural Sustainability Program at Goucher College. From 1985–2000, he was the director of the Folk Arts Program at the New York State Council on the Arts. He is the president of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) Non-Governmental Organization Forum, which advises the UNESCO ICH program, and the vice president of the Fellows of the American Folklore Society. His publications include Public Folklore (1992; coedited with Nick Spitzer), Creolization as Cultural Creativity (2011; coedited with Ana C. Cara), and articles on topics that include intangible public folklore, museum studies, heritage, children's folklore, and the history of folklore studies. He holds a PhD in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania, where his classmates included Mary Hufford and Amy Shuman.

Mary Hufford is Associate Director of the Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN), a link-tank to connect communities, organizations, and scholars. She has served as folklife specialist at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and director of the Center for Folklore and Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania, and on their graduate faculty in Folklore and Folklife. A Guggenheim fellow, she is editor of Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage (1994) and has coauthored numerous articles and monographs on community, culture, and environment.

Amy Shuman is Professor Emerita of Folklore at The Ohio State University and Past President of the Fellows of the American Folklore Society. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Folklore Society's Lifetime Achievement Award. Her publications include Storytelling Rights: The Uses of Oral and Written Texts among Urban Adolescents (2006); Other People's Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy (2010); Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century (2007; coauthored with Carol Bohmer); and Political Asylum Deceptions: The Culture of Suspicion (2017; coauthored with Carol Bohmer). Her research on the artisan stonecarvers of Pietrasanta, Italy, includes discussions of heritage and the practice of craft.