Call: SIEF Summer School 2026

Living Things, Lasting Forms, Narratives: Co-creating Heritages

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.

Short description: 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.

Focus: The entanglement of objects, places and living practices; community co-curation and narratives.

 

Theme

The Living Things, Lasting Forms, Narratives Summer School examines how heritage is never only about static objects in glass cases but is entangled with places, practices, genres and the living beings — human and more-than-human — that sustain them. We ask: How do material forms, stories and living practices co-produce each other across generations? What does co-creative heritage look like when communities, scholars and technologists collaborate to document, preserve and reinvent cultural practices? How can methodologies move beyond extractive documentation toward shared stewardship and mutual benefit?

We conceive “heritage” as an ongoing process: craft economies that keep techniques alive through repetition and repair; ritual calendars, lived religions and narrative genres (legends, memory-tales, proverbs) that animate landscapes; and culinary knowledge that translates place into taste. These processes intersect with layered histories, social transformations, migration and translocal connections, urbanisation, and biodiverse ecologies shaped by small-scale farming, pastoralism and urban adaptations. We aim to produce sensory-rich case studies that show how particular communities perceive multispecies relations—case studies that include transcripts, emic glosses and contextual essays co-authored with narrators.

We are especially interested in the questions that arise when heritage is treated as co-created: How do documentation practices and genre classification (e.g., legend, recipe, craft manual, ritual script) influence both preservation and continuity? And in what ways do digital technologies alter the stakes of preservation, access, reuse and further making? How might “tradition,” broadly conceived, be re-described or re-interpreted through new research perspectives and methodologies, and in what ways can such reframings be returned to the community so that tradition-bearers themselves recognize its dynamic nature and accept that change is not a loss but part of continuity? To what extent do processes of urbanisation and technological mediation enhance, rather than threaten, what we perceive as “tradition,” and how do everyday practices in cities embody and negotiate heritage in lived form? How does the act of documentation reconfigure the visibility, authority and interpretive role of tradition-bearers—do certain narrators, genders or generations become more prominent while others recede? How might a focus on the senses as a method of fieldwork allow us to better understand the embodied, affective and multispecies dimensions of cultural practice, and how does this justify the concept of an ethnography of the senses? Finally, with respect to non-human actors, how do digital media representations (e.g., AI, soundscapes, algorithmically tagged datasets) reframe their presence and agency and enhance the building and meaning-making of everyday practices, narratives, rituals and environments or artefacts in co-created archives—what forms of multispecies or material participation do they make visible, and which remain obscured?

Athens will serve as a working laboratory for these inquiries. Fieldwalks and site-based research (including visits to the Museum of Modern Greek Culture, neighbourhoods such as Anafiotika, Kypseli and Psyrri, and selected peri-urban sites) and sensory ethnography will illuminate how urban traditions are remade under pressures of tourism, gentrification, migration and economic change. Methods will include pop-up storytelling interventions; dialogues with practitioners (guides, shopkeepers, cultural mediators, municipal planners and grassroots organisers); visits to festivals, markets and workshops to observe how everyday practices embody and negotiate heritage; and cooking demonstrations, collaborative meals and storytelling circles as modes of engagement with intangible cultural forms.

The Summer School aims to equip participants with conceptual tools and hands-on techniques for community-centred research, documentation and classification that foreground reciprocity, consent and long-term collaboration. It seeks to produce outputs that are useful both to scholarship and to the communities that sustain narratives, living things and lasting forms.

 

Focus

• Entanglement of material forms, living practices and narratives as culturally situated knowledge.
• Community co-curation: shared decision-making, consent, co-authorship and benefit-sharing in documentation and archiving.
• Sensory and narrative methods that prioritise emic categories, embodied techniques and local storytelling as research data.
• Urban dynamics and continuity: how traditions are remade in urban contexts (tourism, gentrification, migration, economic change), using Athens as a living laboratory.

Activities
Participants will work in thematic-based teams through a programme of practice-led modules:

• Fieldwalks and sensory ethnography in Athens (Museum of Modern Greek Culture; neighbourhoods such as Anafiotika, Kypseli, Psyrri; and selected peri-urban sites).
• Story circles, listening labs and oral-history sessions that foreground narrative genres, proverbs and sensory life-histories.
• Craft, cooking and collaborative-meal labs that combine skill-sharing with narrative elicitation.
• Photogrammetry and AV labs producing 3D models and annotated audiovisual fragments with narrators’ commentary.
• Mini-ethnographies co-conducted with local partners to document living practices in situ.
• Public engagements (pop-up storytelling events, community screenings, and interactive displays) to test co-created outputs with local audiences.

Methods

• Sensory ethnography and practice-led documentation.
• Participatory and reflexive approaches: story circles, co-authored note-taking, and collaborative transcription with emic glosses.
• Digital documentation: photogrammetry, multi-track AV recording and lightweight gesture/technique indexing.

Outcomes
By programme end participants and community partners will co-produce:

• A concise public report and dissemination materials (short films, web portfolios) intended for both academic audiences and the communities involved.

Why this matters
Heritage lives in practices and stories as much as in objects. By foregrounding narratives, sensory experience and co-curation, this Summer School trains participants to document and support living transmission in ways that respect local authority and sustain cultural resilience. Working with Athens’ layered urban landscapes allows testing of methods where tradition, migration and economic change meet—producing ethically grounded archives, pedagogical tools and community-led proposals that strengthen both memory and future-making.

Applications
The SIEF Board, together with the local organizing team, warmly welcomes applications from doctoral students who wish to engage with the theme of the Summer School and explore its relevance to their own research. While the call is primarily aimed at current doctoral candidates, applications from advanced master’s students and recent postdoctoral researchers with an interest in the topic are also encouraged. Applicants are asked to submit:

• a curriculum vitae (CV), and
• a motivation letter (max. 500 words) describing their interest in attending the Summer School, their research background, and the ways in which their doctoral, master’s, or postdoctoral project connects to the theme.

Please send your cv and the motivation letter to sief(at)meertens.knaw.nl. The deadline is 01 December 2025.

Programme and Credits
The programme will feature keynote lectures addressing theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives on the theme, alongside roundtable sessions led by experienced practitioners, peer-to-peer discussions of central concepts, and guided thematic tours through the city. Conceived as a doctoral workshop, the Summer School awards participants who complete the full programme 3 ECTS credits, accredited by the University of West Attica.

Fees, Accommodation, and Travel
There is no participation fee for the Summer School. However, the organizers are unable to cover travel costs or provide accommodation. Participants are therefore advised to seek financial support from their home institutions or other funding sources. In cases of financial difficulty, applicants are encouraged to contact sief(at)meertens.knaw.nl. Accepted participants will receive a list of recommended accommodation options in Athens.

For further questions about the programme, please feel free to contact us at keel(at)academyofathens.gr. We look forward to welcoming you in Athens!