Booking is now open for the annual conference of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. This year’s event will concentrate on racial and ethnic diversity, both historically focused and in contemporary discourse.

The conference will take place on Saturday 13 November 2021 and will be a hybrid event, with speakers and delegates both online and in the building at Cecil Sharp House.

It will focus on racial diversity in folk, combining historical discourse and the contemporary scene. In retaining an online option post-lockdowns we hope to welcome people from across the world, creating a forum for lively debate across boundaries on this crucial theme.

Papers will include:

• The Black origins of sea shanties
• How to Increase and Diversify Participation in English Folk Clubs?
• International Relations: Nationalism and Internationalism in the English Folk Dance Revival
• The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience
• Racial crosscurrents in Appalachian folk song
• Celebrating Diversity – Applications of Folklore to Shared Society Education within the Conflict Situation of the Middle East
• Folk purism, the enemy of diversity
   

Provisional programme

(all times are Greenwich Mean Time)

09.30: arrive, tea and coffee

10.00
Welcome and Keynote:
Tina K. Ramnarine (Royal Holloway, University of London): Transnational folk

SESSION 1
11.00
Jim Mageean (Newcastle University): The black origins of sea shanties

11.30
Talitha MacKenzie (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland): The Hog-Eye Man and other stories: Colourism in the Afro-American sea shanty

12.00: Coffee

SESSION 2
12.15
Derek Schofield: International relations: Nationalism and internationalism in the English folk dance revival

12.45
Brian Peters: Racial crosscurrents in Appalachian folk song IN PERSON

13.15 – 14.15: Lunch

SESSION 3a
14.15
Rose Ardron: The southern folk cultural revival project

14.45
Nick Wall (Vaughan Williams Memorial Library): Folk purism, the enemy of diversity

SESSION 3b
14.15
Simon Lichman (Centre for Creativity in Education and Cultural Heritage (CCECH)): Celebrating Diversity – Applications of Folklore to Shared Society Education within the Conflict Situation of the Middle East.

14.45
Alex Burgar: An inclusive EUtopia? Folk, images of identity, and diversity on the Eurovision stage

15.15: Coffee

SESSION 4
15.30
Chloe Middleton-Metcalfe: Fun not fascism: Exploring perceptions of white nativist ethnicity in contemporary English folk culture.

16.00
Fay Hield (University of Sheffield): How to increase and diversify participation in English Folk Clubs?

SESSION 5
16.30
Angeline Morrison (Falmouth University): The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience

17.00
Katherine Mueller: Folk Dance Remixed: Re-imagining English folk for 21st-century Britain

17.30
Closing Remarks

Book now