Letter of the President

Marie Sandberg discusses the impact of recent political developments for the field and points out the published Statement of concern.
Furthermore, she announces the upcoming 17th SIEF Congress in Scotland, organized by the Elphinstone Institute for Ethnology, Folklore, and Ethnomusicology, University of Aberdeen, on June 3rd‒6th, 2025 and invites everyone to join the mentoring program as well as the General Assembly on June 5th 2025, at 19.00.

Dear Colleagues,

With ever-growing right-wing control, new strands of illiberalism, and repression spreading across the world, also in countries recently known as liberal democracies, our scholarly field seems to be at a turning point. While diversity programs are dismantled and research funding is cut unexpectedly, it is more important than ever to reinforce the strength of our critical, academic engagement with the world through systematic ethnographic scrutiny. This engagement includes the ability to see and understand different worldviews and perspectives and to stand in solidarity with those affected. Please read our Statement of concern on ongoing assaults on academic freedom in the US published by SIEF together with the invitation to participate in our Academic Freedom Sanctuary on June 4, 2025.

The 17th SIEF Congress in Scotland, organized by the Elphinstone Institute for Ethnology, Folklore, and Ethnomusicology, University of Aberdeen, June 3‒6, 2025, offers a vital forum for collective, critical thinking, establishing new synergies, productive exchange of ideas and innovative hands-on experiences, based on the theme of Unwriting.

With Unwriting, we aim to address hierarchies, perceived wisdoms, and innate senses of superiority by developing new ways of thinking about honoring and ceding space to bottom-up research and ethnographic analysis. “Unwriting” suggests a constructive, active, or even activist attitude of redoing, remaking, rewriting – and focusing on practices, materiality, and narratives that can foster decolonial, feminist and more-than-human perspectives. Unwriting invites us to act, and to reflect on our former actions and how we can do things differently. In contrast to the sometimes-dark histories of our academic traditions, we have a chance to create new, embedded, and relational visions for the future.

From the opening plenary on “Unwriting enquiries” to “Unwriting hegemonies” and “Unwriting history”, the keynote sessions will explore different strategies for decentering authority and for rethinking hegemonic repositories of knowledge. The fourth session, “Performing unwriting”, will be experimental in kind, spotlighting arts-based methodologies while seeking to challenge our habitual (and often written) modal habits. The closing roundtable debate on “Unwriting and resisting” will use activist strategies of counter-archiving and counter-narrating practices to galvanize marginalized voices, posing the question how we can undo the power of writing that has traditionally defined “those who have only been written about.”

SIEF 2025 calls for ethnologists, folklorists, anthropologists, and scholars from adjacent fields to join us in this mission to restore social justice and find ways to make sense of our time. We can look forward to 957 papers that have been accepted for the 108 exciting panels, workshops, roundtables, and combined formats, plus 3 poster sessions and a film program containing 9 streams, presenting no less than 26 films! I would like to encourage you to take part in SIEF’s mentoring program for early-career scholars aimed at developing graduates’ career options, which will be organized for delegates participating face-to-face as well as online. Here, junior scholars and more experienced scholars can meet and exchange ideas one on one. We need both mentors and mentees to join! Please sign up here.

A huge appreciation to our local host and organizer, the Elphinstone Institute for Ethnology, Folklore and Ethnomusicology, for diligently and carefully preparing the congress so that everyone can feel welcome at SIEF2025!

A few months back, SIEF hosted the “Culture in Dialogue” talk: “Heritage at War. Plan and Prepare.” The topic of the conversation was the recently published book “Heritage at War. Plan and Prepare”, edited by Mark Dunkley, Anna Tulliach, and Lisa Mol, and discussant was Regina F. Bendix. The talk took place on Zoom on Tuesday, 21 January 2025 with more than 50 participants. We are happy to continue this Culture in Dialogue series which was introduced in 2022 by the SIEF Board to encourage, initiate, and develop communication across boundaries. Thank you to all presenters and participants for joining us.

As this SIEF Newsletter testifies, SIEF continues to be the state-of-the-art international society representing our vibrant scholarly communities of ethnology, folklore, cultural anthropology and adjoining fields in brilliant ways. Please enjoy the reports from the SIEF Working Groups and news from our two SIEF journals, Cultural Analysis and Ethnologia Europaea, which are both peer-reviewed and open-access publications. The SIEF2025 will mark an important anniversary of Cultural Analysis – 25 years of publications!

Finally, I would like to invite you to the SIEF2025 General Assembly during the Aberdeen congress, which is scheduled for Thursday 5 June 2025, at 19.00. New members for the SIEF board will be elected. According to the SIEF bylaws, the composition of the board should reflect the SIEF core values of diversity, geographical distribution and disciplinary balance between ethnology and folklore. There is an open call, so please present your candidacy to sief@meertens.knaw.nl. After the meeting, the winner of the SIEF Young Scholar Prize 2025, Ognjen Kojanić, will present his article Micron Engagements, Macro Histories: Machines and the Agency of Labor in a Worker-Owned Company.

Yours Sincerely,
Marie Sandberg, President of SIEF