Letter of the President

Marie Sandberg warns about recent scam letters and asks to report them as phishing. Sandberg also announces the call for panels for the upcoming SIEF congress in Aberdeen. Furthermore, she invites you to submit your best work for publication, either in one of SIEF‘s two flagship journals or in the new SIEF Series in Ethnology and Folklore.

Dear Colleagues,

“Dear NN. I know you’re busy, so I’ll be brief. I’d be so grateful if you could help the board today? Kindly let me know so I can explain better. Thanks!” Several members have contacted me after receiving a letter like the above, allegedly from the SIEF President, asking if they could do me a favor. Often the sender is in a hurry, in effect imposing time pressure upon the receiver to spur immediate reaction. Some letters are more direct, asking for a wire transfer “since the board treasurer is presently on vacation overseas”.

These letters are scams, obviously. To be sure, SIEF would never contact you to ask for any favors or wire transfers. Thus, Nomad-IT has regularly sent out warnings to our community; however, preventing the scams from happening overall seems difficult. The only action we can all make is to report the scam as phishing; in most email-programs this can easily be done by pressing a button that alerts the spam filter. I would like to thank all of you who have taken the time to alert me. I appreciate our communication, and please do not hesitate to write me at any time, regarding these or any other matters.

SIEF is thrilled to have announced the call for papers for our upcoming congress in Scotland, organized by the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, June 3‒6, 2025, on the theme Unwriting.

By unwriting, we can redo, retract or rewind some of what has been inscribed into established wisdoms or hegemonic knowledge. The act of writing – from thick description to fieldnotes, monographs and articles – is a core part of our scholarly practice. Not least with the introduction of AI and clever chatbots, we direly need to discuss our ethnographic writing, along with other modes of expression. Unwriting invites us to act, and to reflect on how we have been doing things and how they can be done differently. In contrast with the sometimes dark histories of our academic traditions, we have a chance to create new, embedded, and relational visions for the future.

SIEF 2025 calls for ethnologists, folklorists, anthropologists, and scholars from adjacent fields to join us in this mission to restore social justice and to be thinking and looking ahead. We look forward to receiving and reading your submissions!

Please also feel invited to submit your best work for publication, either in one of our two flagship journals, Cultural Analysis and Ethnologia Europaea, or in the new SIEF Series in Ethnology and Folklore: New Directions in the Study of Everyday Life, Past and Present with Berghahn Books. The SIEF book series presents cutting-edge research in the fields of European ethnology, folklore studies and related fields by publishing rigorous peer-reviewed monographs and edited collections showcasing a wide range of everyday life practices, cultural traditions, and belief systems from around the world, past and present. Hande Birkalan-Gedik is the first co-editor of the series, and we are happy to announce that the open call for a second co-editor has been concluded: Welcome to Anthony Bak Buccitelli, who currently serves as Director of the Pennsylvania Center for Folklore and is the Interim Assistant Dean for Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of American Studies and Communications at the Pennsylvania State University.

Last but not least I would like to send my warmest wishes to the recently held SIEF Summer School 2024 in Zagreb, which gathered 24 students from 15 countries to explore how, why, and for whom “Postscapes Matter” in a postmodern, postsocialist, postyugoslav, and postindustrial context. The summer school was successfully organized in a collaboration with the ERIM project from The Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, University of Zagreb, the Trešnjevka Mapping project, and Documenta – Centre for Dealing with the Past, Zagreb. Cudos!

Sincerely yours,
Marie Sandberg, President of SIEF

Photo by: Maria Frantzoulis