SIEF Summer School 2026 06/11/2025

The Living Things, Lasting Forms, Narratives Summer School reconceives heritage as an ongoing, co-creative process in which material forms, narrative genres and living practices—human and more-than-human—mutually sustain one another.

The local organizer of the SIEF Summer School 2026 will be the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre, Academy of Athens and the Museum of Modern Greek Culture. The Summer School will take place 4-11 October 2026.

View the Summer Schools page

Upcoming Conference: Tradition archives in motion: sounding out good practices and challenges with folk collections

International Conference | 29. June – 1 July 2026 | Freiburg, Germany

Photo: Rühmeier/Univ. Freiburg

Organized by the Centre for Popular Culture and Music, University of Freiburg in cooperation with the SIEF Working Group on Archives and the Institute for Cultural Analysis of the Germans of Eastern Europe.

Folklore and tradition archives, as well as GLAM institutions in general, are making more and more materials available online in a mediatised world. Resources such as online collections enable direct access to ethnographic and historical sources and enhance research possibilities; curated online dissemination and exhibitions present selected holdings and research results. As the internet is a very audiovisual medium, such content is often built around attractive visual and sound documents in order to reach out to the general public and to communities connected to and interested in the collections.

Ongoing discussions in our field focus on the potentials and challenges that are created once the step into the digital realm has been taken. Collections of culture, in the form of digitised and born-digital data, become ‘mobile’: archival staff envision and implement new ways of processing, researching, presenting, and communicating information, while considering participatory modes of design for research and archiving. These changes come with a whole range of conceptual and technical considerations that shape the ways in which folk and ethnographic archives deal with folklore/cultural heritage, partner institutions, and communities.

The conference aims to address topical issues such as long-term safeguarding, digitisation, access to collections, community management, and target audiences, to name a few. While typical discussions often focus on ‘best practice’ examples, we would also like to spotlight what is feasible by asking what ‘good practice’ is in times of scarce resources, technological uncertainties, and institutional emphasis on ‘visibility’

More on the conference here >>

Workshop Embodiment Revisited 13-14 August, Helsinki

In August 2026, the Feminist Approaches to Ethnology Folklore Working Group is hosting their second interim meeting. We will meet in Helsinki for a two-day workshop on the topic of ‘Embodiment Revisited’. Although embodiment has long been a central concern of feminist theory, we consider the topic as it intersects with feminist theory to be unfinished business. The concept of Embodiment has too often been reduced to mean ‘things that originate from the body,’ and there is a great need to advance this theoretically. With this workshop, we want to create the opportunity for all of us to develop our thoughts and research in a collective format, through discussion and critical thinking, to take advantage of the broad range of insights that can emerge through group interaction.

More information here >>

New name and mission statement: WG Museums, Material Culture and Communities of Practice

Museum der Alltagskultur, Schloss Waldenbuch, LandesMuseum Württemberg, exhibition Wohnwelten & Wohnstudio, photo taken by Inkeri Hakamies.

We are pleased to announce that the Working Group Museums and Material Culture has updated its name and mission statement to include Communities of Practice. We welcome all SIEF members to join the group and participate in this new chapter.

Read our new statement >>

Call for Papers: Museums and Emotional Sustainability in a Time of Polycrisis

Co-organized by the SIEF Working Group on Museums and Material Culture, this conference invites you to thought-provoking discussions on how museums can address affective polarization, strengthen individual and collective resilience, navigate the emotional labour of museum professionals, and to reflect on the broader societal impact of emotional sustainability. Please submit your proposal by 30 April 2026.

View details>>

CALL CLOSED: Transformations and Applications of Folkloristic and Ethnological Knowledge: Historical Perspectives on Public Practice

Photo by Dom Fou on Unsplash

The International Society for Ethnology and Folklore’s (SIEF) Historical Approaches in Cultural Analysis (HACA) and Cultural Heritage and Property (CHP) Working Groups, in cooperation with the IDEAS (Aix-Marseille University, CNRS) will present a symposium with participatory roundtable discussions between 27-29 May 2026, in Aix-en-Provence, France. The call for proposals has closed.

The original Call for Papers can be found here.

CALL CLOSED: Vernacular Responses To Religious Conflicts, Crises, And (Re)Conciliations

Photo: Book cover Vernacular Religion (Primiano, L.N.) 2022, NYU Press. Jesus and the Children, n.d., hooked rug by Sister Ann Ameen (Collection Leonard Primiano)

Organized by SIEF Ethnology of Religion Working Group and the ICS-ULisboa, the conference will be held in Lisbon, between 7-8 September 2026.
Thank you for your submission.

The original Call for Papers can be found here.

Online Reading Club

In 2025, the WG for Museums and Material Culture launched a new Reading Club to encourage more regular meetings and discussions about recent research. The club will generally convene once a month, with meetings held online. For each meeting, we will read a selected article or similar material of interest, but you can also join without preparation, as the discussions usually move on to cover more general issues.View details >>

XXXVth Eurethno Workshop (Council of Europe)

Photo: L. S. Fournier

5th conference of the SIEF Francophone Working Group
16th conference of the SIEF Ritual Year Working Group

Campus Carlone, Nice, France, 24-27 October 2026 – Université Côte d’Azur – LAPCOS UPR 7278. Organized by the LAPCOS UPR 7278 research unit and the department of ethnology-anthropology of the Côte d’Azur University, together with the FER-Eurethno network (Council of Europe), the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) and the French Society for Ethnology (SEF). View details >>

New Issue of Cultural Analysis, 24:1 (2026)

This special issue of Cultural Analysis uses the example of folkloristic research in and about China—where translation of English-language theoretical writing, and minority traditions play a key role in the history, current status, and future trajectories of the folkloristic discipline—to re-center perspectives on translation in folkloristic theory and stimulate interest in translation work within the discipline.

New issue of Ethnologia Europaea, Vol. 55, no. 1

The current issue of Ethnologia Europaea, volume 55, no. 1, features three articles, an ethnographic snapshot and two in memoriam appreciations. It is not a special issue, but readers will quickly identify the strong Nordic content within these pages. Thematically, some readers might feel that hybridity is equally back in the centre ring as a significant conceptual harmoniser.