Women of the Twilight: The Narrative Spaces of Women in the Icelandic Rural Community of the Past

The article deals with some of the spatial features of women’s storytelling traditions in rural Iceland in the late nineteenth century and early 1900s. The study is based on audiotaped sources collected by folklore collector Hallfreður Örn Eiríksson in the 1960s and 1970s from informants born in rural Iceland in the later part of the nineteenth century. The main focus of the article is on 200 women that figure in these sources and their legend repertoires, although a small sample group of 25 men and their repertoires will also be examined to allow comparison. The article discusses what these sources tell us about women’s mobility and the social spaces they inhabited in the past. It goes on to consider the performance space of the Icelandic turf farm in which women’s storytelling took place from the perspective of gender. After noting how the men and women in the sources incorporated different kinds of spaces into their legends, it takes a closer look at how the spatial components of legends told by the women reflect their living spaces, experiences, and spheres of activity. The article underlines that while women in the Icelandic rural community were largely confined to the domestic space of the farm (something reflected in the legends they told), they were neither socially isolated nor immobile. They also evidently played an important part in oral storytelling in their communities, often acting as the dominant storytellers in the performance space of the old turf farm.

Legends of Lace: Commerce and Ideology in Narratives of Women’s Domestic Craft Production

Although a relatively recent invention (c. 1500), many legends have accumulated around the origins of lace, more than have been recorded for other crafts. Almost every region involved in pillow or needle lace had its own origin story: I will concentrate on those circulating in Italy, Catalonia, France, Belgium, and England. Lacemaking was a poorly paid, dispersed and overwhelmingly female occupation, but none the less it had a strong craft tradition, including the celebration of particular saints’ feastdays. The legends drew on elements of this work culture, and especially the strong connections to royal courts and the Catholic Church, but they did not originate among lacemakers themselves. Rather they were authored by persons – lace merchants and other patrons – who in the nineteenth century took on the task of defending homemade lace in its drawn-out conflict with machine-made alternatives. Legends first circulated in print, in lace histories, newspapers and magazines, before transferring to other media such as the stage, historical pageants, even the visual arts. More recently they have continued to propagate on the web. While not originally oral narratives, they behave much like legends in oral storytelling environments: they are usually unsourced; they accumulate and shed motifs; they adapt to new circumstances and audiences. They were told with the intention of creating a special status for handmade lace, and to mobilize protectors and consumers.

The stories African lawyers could tell when analysing legal issues: Lessons for social sciences teachers

Activists and academics have clamoured for the decolonisation of knowledge, including law. But, unfortunately hardly anyone has put forth strategies for how faculties should decolonise the law. A number of jurists have underscored the necessity to draw on customary laws and traditional values. Still, the #RhodesMustFall movement has, for the most part, been loud on the outcomes, but quiet on the methodologies. Joining the conversation on the decolonisation of epistemologies, this article contributes to the ongoing efforts to sanitise the law by proposing to revive African oral storytelling cultures as a way to analyse the questions of law facing society. To live up to this task, this article adopts decolonial theory and, through stylised examples, illustrates how lawyers and social scientists in Africa can utilise storytelling to contextualise, (de)construct, and comprehend those questions. This article assumes that lawyers can use African storytelling alongside the prevailing doctrinal method. That method, relaying the coloniality of law and captured by the acronym IRAC (issue(s), rules, application, and conclusion), trains students to approach conflict in society through a highly abstract and decontextualised problem-solving model. Lately, some (Western) social scientists have (re)discovered the practicality of storytelling in presenting analysis and research. However, in African oral traditions, stories worked differently from the manner in which those scientists employ them. African storytelling played a leading role, not only in conveying collective wisdom and social memory from one generation to the next, but also as a medium through which communities transmit the values that hold them together.Contribution: This article adds to the scholarship on storytelling and narratology by showing how educators can utilise stories to analyse legal questions. That rich scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences has so far not taken seriously the possibility of using stories to analyse research problems. Instead, scholars focus on storytelling mainly as a way of presenting science, not as an analytical tool. This article bridges that gap and demonstrates the analytical value of storytelling.

Supporting literacies for children of color: A strength-based approach to pre-school literacy by (Daniel R )

Supporting Literacies for Children of Color is half theoretic examination, half guidebook; the text revolves around the research that pre-school students of Color, historically underestimated, have cultural and linguistic strengths that should be recognized and supported in learning spaces. Meier establishes a strengths-based approach to literacy—stressing the importance of creating a developmentally engaging curriculum that includes books, oral storytelling, personal journals, drawings, and writings. A strong benefit of Meier’s text is that by using his own experiences, those of colleagues, and of families of Color, he connects theories to real life in a way that makes them accessible enough that educators and librarians of all levels will find value in adding it to their collection of professional development books.

From storytelling to Facebook. Content biases when retelling or sharing a story

Cultural evolution researchers use transmission chain experiments to investigate which content is more likely to survive when transmitted from one individual to another. These experiments resemble oral storytelling, where individuals need to understand, memorise, and reproduce the content. However, prominent contemporary forms of cultural transmission—think an online sharing— only involve the willingness to transmit the content. Here I present two fully preregistered online experiments that explicitly investigated the differences between these two modalities of transmission. The first experiment (N=1080) examined whether negative content, information eliciting disgust, and threat-related information were better transmitted than their neutral counterpart in a traditional transmission chain set-up. The second experiment (N=1200), used the same material, but participants were asked whether they would share or not the content in two conditions: in a large anonymous social network, or with their friends, in their favourite social network. Negative content was both better transmitted in transmission chain experiments and shared more than its neutral counterpart. Threat-related information was successful in transmission chain experiments but not when sharing, and, finally, information eliciting disgust was not advantaged in either. Overall, the results present a composite picture, suggesting that the interactions between the specific content and the medium of transmission are important and, possibly, that content biases are stronger when memorisation and reproduction are involved in the transmission—like in oral transmission—than when they are not—like in online sharing.

Brothers in the kitchen: the uprising, exodus and survival of a Tamily minority

Brothers In the Kitchen (BiTk), is a site-specific live-documentary performed with an audience inside a fully operational restaurant. The triumvirate of story, performance, and audience is used to create an interactive and immersive documentary experience incorporating oral storytelling, poetry, dance, music, archival materials and television— all performed live. BiTk is the story of the uprising, exodus and survival of Tamil Sri Lankan citizens who fled a brutal civil war and sought refuge in Canada. The ethnic conflict, between the Buddhist Sinhala majority and the Hindu Tamil minority, sparked a mass exodus following the deadly riots of Black July in 1983. Subsequently, a staggering 300,000 Tamils found asylum in Canada. Soon an inordinate number of them began work as cooks and dishwashers in many Canadian restaurants. This live documentary is performed thirty years after the arrival of the first boatload of Tamil refugees, found adrift off the coast of Newfoundland, in 1986.

Brothers in the kitchen: the uprising, exodus and survival of a Tamily minority

Brothers In the Kitchen (BiTk), is a site-specific live-documentary performed with an audience inside a fully operational restaurant. The triumvirate of story, performance, and audience is used to create an interactive and immersive documentary experience incorporating oral storytelling, poetry, dance, music, archival materials and television— all performed live. BiTk is the story of the uprising, exodus and survival of Tamil Sri Lankan citizens who fled a brutal civil war and sought refuge in Canada. The ethnic conflict, between the Buddhist Sinhala majority and the Hindu Tamil minority, sparked a mass exodus following the deadly riots of Black July in 1983. Subsequently, a staggering 300,000 Tamils found asylum in Canada. Soon an inordinate number of them began work as cooks and dishwashers in many Canadian restaurants. This live documentary is performed thirty years after the arrival of the first boatload of Tamil refugees, found adrift off the coast of Newfoundland, in 1986.