Folklore (FOLKLOR)

Terms offered: Spring 2011, Summer 2006 10 Week Session, Spring 2006
This course examines a broad range of theories that elucidate the formal, structural, and contextual properties of narratives in relation to gestures, the body, and emotion; imagination and fantasy; memory and the senses; space and time. It focuses on narratives at work, on the move, in action as they emerge from the matrix of the everyday preeminently, storytelling in conversation--as key to folk genres--the folktale, the legend, the epic, the myth.
Theories of Narrative: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
This seminar explores the emergence of notions of tradition and modernity and their reproduction in Eurocentric epistemologies and political formations. It uses work by such authors as Anderson, Butler, Chakrabarty, Clifford, Derrida, Foucault, Latour, Mignolo, Pateman, and Poovey to critically reread foundational works published between the 17th century and the present--along with philosophical texts with which they are in dialogue--in terms of how they are imbricated within and help produce traditionalities and modernities.
Theories of Traditionality and Modernity: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This seminar explores the emergence of notions of tradition and modernity and their reproduction in Eurocentric epistemologies and political formations. It uses work by such authors as Anderson, Butler, Chakrabarty, Clifford, Derrida, Foucault, Latour, Mignolo, Pateman, and Poovey to critically reread foundational works published between the 17th century and the present--along with philosophical texts with which they are in dialogue--in terms of how they are imbricated within and help produce traditionalities and modernities.
Theories of Traditionality and Modernity: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This seminar focuses on artworks made by migrating peoples chronicling their journeys (Hmong storycloths, Aztec codices), and artworks made by others who made migration a major theme (Dorothea Lange photographer of dustbowl migrants to California, Jacob Lawrence chronicler of the migration north of African Americans). Also, we focus on the arts of traditional communities that base their artifact production on longstanding, ecologically localized and distinctive practices. Issues include nostalgia, memory, trauma; cultural heritage the selection of what is to be seen, remembered, recoiled from, embraced, what is to be taught to future generations/outsiders concerning fear, courage, pride, self-definitions, accusations, and authenticity.
The Arts of Migration, Vernacular Arts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Collaboration in ethnographic praxis on a local and global scale in folkloristics, sociocultural, linguistic, media, and medical anthropology, producing projects grounded in meaningful engagement with communities. Graduate students, working with lay mentors and faculty, will design and begin implementation of projects that break through infrastructures of theory, research, pedagogy, and practice that reproduce racial hierarchies and that erase anti-racist alternatives.

Experiments in Collaboration and Reciprocal Transformation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023

Readings in Folklore: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023

Directed Research: Read More [+]