Why folkloristics?

On the one hand, folkloristics is the study of cultural forms and expressions – central to it are stories and storytelling, memory and remembering, cognitive worlds, expressive forms and not least an interest for people’s own creativity and narrative competence. On the other hand, the study of such forms and expressions contains cultural theoretical work. The cultural understanding of folkloristics lies close to that of anthropology, but with extra weight placed on tradition – both as material and as a cultural process. The great interest for expressive and strongly marked forms adds an important aesthetical dimension to the discipline’s cultural definitions. Folkloristic’s contributions to cultural theory are fundamentally marked by the material we have chosen to work with, while at the same time these theoretical contributions also produce knowledge about certain cultural expressions.

Folklore studies in the Nordic countries today stand before great challenges. Whilst the subject has grown at universities in Iceland and Estonia, in recent times it has also decreased in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. At the same time, during recent decades, large areas of the cultural and social sciences have shown a detailed interest in central, well-established fields of research within the field of folklore. A number of “turns” towards narrativity, materiality, performativity, form and style have created new “overlaps” which have opened up potential spaces for both the development and transmission of knowledge between several different disciplines. Folklore scholars should therefore also be able to continue to play an important role for the cultural sciences, not least through the unique forms of knowledge that the two sides of the folkloristic tradition enable.

Conference in Visby, Gotland, Sweden, 10-12 June 2015

Set against this background, we wish to gather folklorists, ethnologists and other cultural researchers to a discussion about folkloristics current contributions to today’s development of knowledge in the cultural sciences. “Why Folkloristics! has two questions as its starting point: “To what do we need folkloristics?” and “What kinds of knowledge do folklorists claim to produce?”

We welcome contributions to highlight these questions in the form of papers and sessions. We welcome papers both with focus on cultural theoretical work and on empirical studies. Thematically the papers can take inspiration from the entire folkloristic field of research.

They could for example touch upon:

• small personal narratives
• large narratives about the nation, Europe or the world
• the relationship between tradition and innovation
• cultural heritage and memory research
• expressive forms, expressivity and performance
• stories and narrative
• media and mediation
• materiality

Keynote speakers

• Regina Bendix, Professor, Institut für Kulturanthropologie/Europäische Ethnologie, University of Göttingen, Germany
• Anne Eriksen, Professor, Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo.
• Diane Goldstein, Professor, Folklore Institute, Bloomington Indiana, USA
• Barbro Klein, Director Emerita, Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS), Uppsala University
• Carl Lindahl, Professor, Department of English, Houston University, USA
• Susanne Österlund-Pötzsch, fil dr, researcher Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland.

The conference is arranged in collaboration between the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, University of Uppsala, Campus Gotland and the Institute for Cultural Studies, University of Oslo.

Please submit your proposals by December 15th to Owe.Ronstrom@etnologi.uu.se. Submissions should include the name and affiliation of the participant, the paper title and an abstract (up to 300 words). Notification of acceptance will be sent shortly after.

Information: Uppsala Universitet