Kitta Named Fellow of AFS

Dr. Andrea Kitta was just named a Fellow of the American Folklore Society, which is “an honorary body of folklorists, whose election to the Fellows signifies their outstanding contributions to the field.”

In addition, Kitta gave the Don Yoder Keynote Lecture at the American Folklore Society’s annual meeting. The title was “How to Have Theory in a Pandemic: Precarity, Autoethnography, and Belief Scholarship during COVID.” Kitta discussed her “ongoing fieldwork in ways we often don’t discuss, primarily because of the cultural restraints in academia that, despite emphasis on reflexivity, still do not allow us to be fully honest about our own subjectivity.” During the meeting, Kitta was also part of a panel on internet sensation Jorts the Cat titled Jorts: (Unbuttered, Unbothered, Unionized). My lecture was titled “Are You Helping or are you Buttering the Cat? Jorts and Disability Twitter.” Jorts tweeted about the presentation during the session to his over 225,500 followers.

Lastly, Kitta was invited to the University of Lund in Sweden, where she was part of an advisory board on big data and vaccination. She also gave a lecture titled “What Exactly Were They Doing with that Bat Anyway? COVID Rumors and Conspiracies.”