The 17th international SIEF congress will take place at the University of Aberdeen in Aberdeen, Scotland

The call for panels is open 02 Sep-07 Oct 2024

Theme: Unwriting

Linguistic, discursive, and reflexive writing has long been a core activity for ethnographers, whether in the field or behind the desk. Ethnology, Folklore, and Anthropology were seen as interpreting the oral ’Other’ into the written modern world, with inscription becoming a measure of fact and truth – ’Can I have that in writing?’ These acts of mediation often carry with them an innate sense of superiority over the subject and source, even in disciplines that have lionised the oral and material vernaculars from their inception.

Unwriting is a powerful tool with which to retract, or rewrite, some of what has been inscribed or recorded, allowing us to reshape that which power has imposed and presenting an opportunity for those who have often only been written about.

SIEF2025 invites ethnologists, folklorists, anthropologists, and scholars from adjacent fields to do some unwriting: redo, seek or restore social justice, dismantle hegemonic frameworks which limit us to predetermined paths towards predictable conclusions. We ask for new ways of honouring and ceding space to bottom-up research and analysis, an opportunity for Indigenous and insider scholars to take centre stage, facilitating more equitable scholarly texts for all.

The ’discursive turn’ and ideas of ’writing culture’ helped to deconstruct academic writing, highlighting the politics of text and connections with practices, institutions, and spaces that produce discipline, hierarchy, and power. Unwriting further suggests a constructive, or even activist role focusing on practices, materiality, and life, while supporting decolonial, feminist, and more-than-human perspectives. It asks us to revisit the consequences of casually accepted paradigms, confronting the unseen, unheard, untellable, or untouched. It invites us to explore undocumented social and material practices of unwriting in practice-based, multi-media, multi-sensual research, incorporating the input of valued partners.

Unwriting works in interdependent symbiosis with writing. In a world of surveillance, we examine the forms of our communications – verbal, in small delimited groups, with encrypted messaging – due to fears of being seen (read). Here, unwriting becomes a mechanism of security, safety, control, all the while avoiding outside control, but when can this engender (self)censorship?

Unwriting is a call to action, a call to reflect on how we have been doing things and how they can be done differently. In contrast with the sometimes dark histories of our academic traditions, we have a chance to create new, embedded, and relational visions, distancing ourselves from skewed, hegemonically generated accounts of the past. By unwriting, we consider what it takes to undo some of what writing’s power has imposed, particularly as we cede space to AI and its algorithms.

Ultimately, unwriting challenges us to create anew in multidimensional ways.