Readers and reviewers approaching any book encounter its cover image and title. This cover depicts a bleak landscape sans humans: an expressionistic mountain ridge where rocks protrude through melting snow beneath a massive mostly reddish sky. Should we anticipate an apocalyptic saga of ice and fire? A discourse on the cultural implications of climate change? A visual metaphor for perpetually fraught institutional landscapes? The dawn of a new age?How does the two-word title resonate with its backdrop? Does “Advancing” augur peril akin to accelerated dementia, syphilis, cancer, plagues, and environmental disasters? Might it instead herald a social imaginary confronting present danger, fervently paralleling the evangelical militancy and social democratic resolve, respectively investing such pithy marching song monikers as “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “Avanti Popolo”? Is “Folkloristics” advanced over “Folklore,” “Folklore and Folklife,” or “Folklore Studies” as our field's name?After reading and pondering this ambitious publication, my answer to the foregoing questions is a resounding, diffuse, appropriately paradoxical yes. Indeed, multiple meanings congrue with this book's genesis as a 2017 conference on the Future of American Folkloristics that slyly shares its FOAF acronym with “Friend of a Friend,” a vernacular phrase for the twisty transmission of contemporary legends.Advancing Folkloristics features contributions from 20 folklorists: a majority of women; LGBTQ+ and BIPOC colleagues and advocates; early-, mid-, and late-career professionals; and workers in academic and, to a far lesser extent, public spheres. Eschewing “folkloristics” and its logical yet abominable correlative “folkloristicians,” co-editors Jesse A. Fivecoate, Kristina Downs, and Meredith A. E. McGriff commence with an inclusive dedication: “To the scholars whose work over the preceding decades has moved our field into new territories and who have sought to force us to imagine more equitable futures. And to the future generations of folklorists who will find their home in this discipline and move us ever forward” (p. v).As foreword writer Margaret A. Mills sagely observes, moving our field ahead is urgent yet daunting, especially given “the present troubling turn toward social polarization and more strident marginalization of at-risk groups” (p. ix). Norma E. Cantú’s afterword joins Mills in praising the ideas, actions, and resolve of contributors as they “urge us forward with a double sense of hope and despair” (p. 218). Indeed as I write this review, Republican state legislators nationwide push bills prohibiting public school educators from using such terms and concepts threaded throughout Advancing Folkloristics as anti-racism, critical race theory, cultural appropriation, cultural competence, de-centering, diversity, equity, hegemony, intersectionality, marginalized, patriarchy, social justice, white supremacy, and whiteness.Within the current American context, the co-editors’ introductory essay, bristling with banned words, emerges as a culture wars manifesto championing our field's “new turn” into “an unmistakably queer, feminist, anti-racist force for the decolonization of the academy” (p. 1). A coeval spate of sympathetic anthologies—Performing Environmentalisms, Theorizing Folklore from the Margins, and What Folklorists Do (all 2021); Culture Work: Folklore for the Public Good (2022); and Decolonizing Folklore (forthcoming)—confirm their assertion. Yet far from toeing and spouting a platitudinous buzzword-studded party line, the folklorists under review here dance and sing across a pluralist progressive anarcho-syndicalist spectrum rooted in distinct yet overlapping personal, philosophical, historical, and theoretical assessments teeming with predictions and polemics, practicality and poetry.Several contributors draw on collaborative ethnography to engage queer, feminist, anti-racist, and decolonizing issues directly. These and other critical concerns seethe beneath the surface of additional essays.“New turn” signaling FOAF conference keynoter Kay Turner's leadoff chapter “Deep Folklore/Queer Folkloristics” brims with pointed iconoclastic playfulness reminiscent of the visionary “queer shoulder to the wheel” driving poet Allen Ginsberg's purposefully meandering, constantly updated “America” (1956). Aptly limning enduring contributions of gay and lesbian folklorists, Turner not only locates our field's fundamental preoccupation with vulgar, cross-grained, “queer” vernacular expressions, but also draws effectively on ethnographic curatorial experiences with contrarian Mexican American altar-makers to show how deep structural impulses compelling folklorists are similarly evident in the “adaptation of folklore by queer artists to notably strong anti-homophobic decolonizing projects” (p. 21).Cory W. Thorne and Guillermo De Los Reyes echo Turner, aligning queer theory with folklorists’ work. Relying on case studies of bathroom laws and pride parades, they simultaneously critique misleading reductive external gender policing rhetoric and the internal homonormative constraints of gay neoliberals bent on keeping unruly queers in their putative place. Resonating with the ecologically sensitive polytheism of Native American and many traditional religions, the always-eloquent Solimar Otero draws on deep fieldwork within Cuba's Afro-Latinx Santeria community in a nuanced revelation of folk beliefs and rituals centered on the maternal ocean deity Yemayá, whose recent flooding fury is considered retribution for “racial, sexual, and environmental violence, especially in the United States in the current sociopolitical climate” (p. 100).From the landlocked northern plains, Phyllis M. May-Machunda ably reflects on workshops convening white educators with new immigrants of color in the Fargo-Moorhead area. Modeling inclusive curricula necessitated after refugee resettlement efforts by Catholic and Lutheran organizations rendered teachers of Germanic Nordic descent ill-prepared for increasingly diverse populations, May-Machunda's activist pedagogy also productively reveals how “communities emerging from war, forced migration, colonization, and oppression reshape, create, and re-create traditions” (p. 150). In a kindred essay, Betty J. Belanus of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage fuses key concepts with concrete examples illustrating curatorial methods for fashioning inclusive accessible collaborative museum exhibits representing the cultural experiences of diverse communities.Meanwhile, Andrea Kitta's “An Epidemic of Meanings,” situated in southwestern Pennsylvania, is a deep, deeply personal, unsparingly open, and critically resolute meditation on anti-vax and opioid addiction ethnography in her rural, conservative, white working-class home territory. Astutely observing that “arguing with them about their privilege or lack of otherness does not help” (p. 44), she interjects an otherwise neglected consideration of class, a critical reminder that the United States’ economically depressed hinterlands—largely populated by descendants of impoverished exploited immigrants—are decaying, abandoned colonies of rampant industrial capitalism.Whereas aforementioned chapters offer equitable possibilities for transforming ethnography into principled public-facing action addressing major social, economic, cultural, and environmental issues, complementary essays fuse these concerns with strategies—invariably requiring, in Anika Wilson's knowing phrase, “constant vigilance and doggedness” (p. 168)—for personal survival and disciplinary advance within the academy. Indeed, Wilson—an African American woman “lone folklorist” in an embattled Africology department—profoundly chronicles trials and occasional hard-won triumphs amid perpetual marginality.Uniformly lucid essays similarly suffused with spunky determination by Anthony Guest-Scott, Wanda G. Addison, Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby, Debra Lattanzi Shutika, Gregory Hansen, and the authorial trio of Andrea Kitta, Lynne S. McNeil, and Trevor J. Blank highlight battle-tested tactics for stimulating students, serving on committees, heading programs, supporting colleagues, forming alliances across departments, finding ways to merge our field's goals with one's institution's mission, harnessing university resources to public folklore projects, acting as university-based experts offering folkloristic insights through media communiques to the general public, and more. Such strategies, as several essayists underscore, may be second nature to scarred septuagenarians of my g-g-generation, but they will be new to many, and are either creatively renewed or newly articulated.The contributors also demonstrate savvy awareness of the varied, sometimes vexing connotations of “folklore” in the academy and the popular imagination, an enduring issue directly addressed in “The Politics of Trivialization” by the anthology's co-editors. Thoughtfully examining long-standing notions of folklore as “trivial,” Fivecoate, Downs, and McGriff deftly sketch folklorists’ bygone and ongoing counter-trivialization strides, with particular attention to the twenty-first century's considerable economic, social, cultural, and environmental challenges.Praiseworthy for its intentions, scope, vision, and applicability, Advancing Folkloristics nonetheless largely privileges the voices and institutional concerns of folklorists in the academy. Whereas several abstracts from the originating 2017 FOAF conference commendably provide distinct yet allied perspectives from folklorists toiling in public agencies, private nonprofits, and as independents, their relative absence in print, coupled with this book's decidedly academic title, portend a limited public folklorist readership. Those exceptions might justly sing snatches of Billy Bragg's “To Have and to Have Not” (1983): “Just because you're going forwards/Doesn't mean I'm going backwards.” That's a pity, since on-the-ground public folklorists relentlessly ponder, advocate, and practice what's preached herein.Caveats aside, Advancing Folkloristics arrives at a pivotal moment for the intersecting trajectories of our field and the United States. Championing and modeling our profession's highest aspirations and best work in a time of mingled peril and promise, its arrival is welcome.