Ceallaigh's Blog

Here are the folklore-related memes I published to social media in September 2020.

For those of you who missed my recent folklore & fiction Twitch conversation with Laura VanArendonk Baugh, you can catch the YouTube replay here:

Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. In this edition, I'm writing about language and verbal lore with help from scholars J.L. Austin and Richard Bauman, author Frank Herbert, Swedish performers Emma Åslund and Åsa Larsson, and others. I'm also exploring the use of language and verbal lore in storycraft and providing you with an exercise on the topic. Settle in, friends! I squeezed a discussion of conspiracy theories into my newsletter schedule last month, so this is nearly a double edition.

Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. This edition is a departure from my promised two-part discussion of language and verbal lore, which will be condensed and presented in a single edition next month. Instead, I'm answering the call of folklore scholar Phillips Stevens Jr., who argues that folklorists are uniquely qualified to address harmful collective narratives and because of this, they have "a professional and moral responsibility to share their knowledge" (Stevens Jr. 1996, 391). I'm also following the lead of Timothy Tangherlini and his fellow scholars, who write that "people are making real-world, and at times violent or dangerous, decisions based on informal stories that circulate on and across their social networks, and that conspiracy theories are a significant part of that storytelling" (Tangherlini et al. 2020, 34). With these arguments in mind, I'll endeavour to provide you with an accessible introduction to narrative scholarship on the topic of conspiracy theories and summarize my discussion with a list of questions you can use to evaluate the trustworthiness of narratives you encounter online and elsewhere.