The Standing Committee on Higher Education in Ethnology and Folklore

Higher education represents an arena that brings together a great number of SIEF members. As a platform that engages both professors and students in producing and sharing knowledge, it enables and enthuses ethnology and folklore studies. That is why the SIEF board considers the strengthening of cooperation in higher education as one of its major strategic goals. Several steps have been taken in that direction, which include designing an interactive map of university departments and programmes in our fields in Europe, establishing the SIEF summer school, etc. The first coordination meeting for the representatives of university departments was organized during the SIEF2015 congress in Zagreb, with the aim of providing a space for exchanging ideas about the potential and challenges in contemporary higher education. At the meeting, quite a few SIEF members participated in a constructive discussion about ways of securing the sustainability and visibility of the departments and programmes of Ethnology and Folklore. They expressed their support for building a network of departments, under the auspices of SIEF. Based on that initiative, the Standing Committee on Higher Education in Ethnology and Folklore was appointed in January 2016.

Members of the committee are as follows:
Nevena Škrbić Alempijević, University of Zagreb
Carna Brkovic, University of Mainz
Laurent Fournier, University of Aix-Marseille
Fabio Mugnaini, University of Siena
Cliona O'Carroll, University College Cork
Thomas O'Dell, University of Lund
Marie Sandberg, University of Copenhagen
Alexandra Schwell, University of Hamburg
Hanna Snellman, University of Helsinki
Helena Tužinska, Comenius University in Bratislava

The Committee's goals and activities are:

to coordinate a network of university departments and programmes in ethnology and folklore

to facilitate cooperation and exchange of information and ideas in this domain

to collect information about existing networks, joint courses and programmes in the fields, and about modalities of starting new ones

to organize coordination meetings of representatives of university departments at SIEF congresses

We cordially invite all SIEF members interested in higher education issues to attend coordination meetings of departmental representatives at SIEF congresses. Also, if you have ideas about the network’s future activities, please contact nskrbic(at)ffzg.hr.

 

The European Ethnology Transnational Syllabus Collective

How can we teach European ethnology beyond and across the boundaries of national ethnological traditions? How do we convey to our students that the boundaries of a language are not the boundaries of the discipline, and that there is much to learn from the diverse ethnological traditions across Europe? Since 1964 SIEF has provided an umbrella framework for bringing together researchers in European ethnology and folklore studies beyond and across national traditions.

With the transnational syllabus of European ethnology, SIEF invites its members to critically reflect on how the national canons of our discipline are taught, while envisioning the teaching and learning of European ethnologies from non-national, more than national, transnational, and/or European perspectives. The European Ethnology Transnational Syllabus Collective has several aims:

• to create an open source for sharing curricula across national boundaries thereby enhancing and strengthening transnational knowledge circulation;
• to decenter existing national scholarly canons by thinking across and beyond their boundaries, and not to create an alternative scholarly canon;
• to offer a partial and fragmented reading of a theme – not all European countries or languages can or should be included in such a syllabus, as the aim is not to be representative;
• to include underrepresented voices in our scholarly disciplines while decentering existing national scholarly canons.

Members of the SIEF Taskforce on transnational syllabus have identified a set of guidelines to enhance transnational exchanges in teaching across national traditions:

• Collaborative: We encourage the collaborative development of such a syllabus by a group of at least three scholars from different countries who work within different traditions of European ethnology.
• Theme-specific: A syllabus may be developed around a specific theme (e.g. “Transnational syllabus of European ethnological approaches to migration”, “Histories of European ethnologies”, “Patchwork syllabus on music and dance in European ethnologies”, etc.).
• Situated: A syllabus should be knowingly and intentionally partial, incomplete, and situated within the particular perspective of the team that developed it.
• Plural: Given their partial and fragmented character, there may be several syllabi on the same theme.
• DEI-oriented: Each syllabus should include traditionally underrepresented scholars (e.g. women, Roma, minorities, migrants), keeping the SIEF DEI lens in the foreground.

SIEF invites its members to form teaching collaborations and collectives with colleagues from other traditions of ethnology and folklore in order to jointly develop new syllabi on various themes. This work may take several forms, including open classrooms, Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), Erasmus+ supported Blended Intensive Programs (BIP), and others.

The European Ethnology Transnational Syllabus Collective will host a digital meeting to facilitate cooperation among our members. If you are interested in taking part in this initiative, please contact us at sief(at)meertens.knaw.nl by 01 December 2025.