CFP: The Stuff of Tradition: Materiality and Media in Folklore Studies

The organizers of the 11th International Conference of Young Folklorists in Helsinki in October 2022 are calling for papers. Submissions are due by April 1, 2022.

The theme of the conference is The Stuff of Tradition: Materiality and Media in Folklore Studies.

Potential themes for proposals include but are not limited to the following subject areas:

• Entanglements of materiality and immateriality, e.g., cultural (heritage) artifacts, artworks, religious and cosmological objects
• Media, (re)mediation, and mediatization of folklore and vernacular expression, e.g., digital and technological mediation, commercial appropriation, traditionalization as re-mediation
• Archival and documentary practices and technologies, e.g., digitalization, quantification, big data
• Sites, environments, spaces, and places of vernacular practice, e.g., social media platforms, virtual spaces
• Human and non-human bodies, their perceptual, affective, agential, and relational capabilities, and their implications for vernacular practice
• Multimodal, non-referential, and ritualized aspects of vernacular expression, e.g., performativity, affectivity, technological assemblages
• (Im)materiality and (im)mediation in the methodology and history of folklore studies
• Material and embodied aspects of metaphors, e.g., textuality as texture, tradition as handing down
• Material representations of extra-sensory phenomena, e.g., the afterlife, the otherworld, and their inhabitants
• Applications in digital, sensory, and auto-ethnography