Ceallaigh's Blog
Folklore & Fiction
The March 2020 Folklore & Fiction dispatch has been recorded as a podcast, and you can both read and listen to it here. In it, I'm discussing charms with help from scholars J. Stanley Hopkins, Jonathan Roper, and others, discussing the use of charms in storycraft, and providing you with an example and an exercise on the topic. I also wrote a supplementary dispatch that month, which I've recorded as a podcast, and you can both read and listen to it here. In this one, written just after the pandemic was declared, I'm discussing the value of keeping a journal you can pass on to others.
Folklore & Fiction
The February 2020 Folklore & Fiction dispatch has been recorded as a podcast, and you can both read it and listen to it here. In this edition, I'm writing about superstition with help from scholars Ülo Valk, Torunn Selberg, Alan Dundes, and others, discussing superstition in the context of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series of books, and providing you with an exercise on the topic.
Greetings Friends!
This month marks a substantial change from the material you're accustomed to receiving from me. I'm podcasting my second year of archives, and the dispatches are already available at folkloreandfiction.com, so there's no sense shipping them out to you as newsletters. Instead, I'm introducing a new newsletter format that combines my Folklore & Fiction work with whatever insights I happen to have on folklore, storytelling, and spirituality along with any news I might have about my own career. Hope you like the change.
This semester, I'll be writing a paper on performance theory, activism, and scholarship using the work of a few well-known activist scholars but primarily that of Dwight Conquergood. My research question, while not fully formed yet, will have something to do with positioning the self in scholarship when the topic is familiar, or even dear to the researcher. I'm presently in this position and will continue to be so throughout the remainder of my PhD research and writing, since I'll be studying the beliefs and performances of animal rights activists in Canada.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the idea of subject positioning, Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harre define it as: