Folklore is all about Otherness. It imagines the other as that which is beyond the scope of the ordinary and the real. It evokes the monstrous, the divine, and the outsider. It invokes magic through ritual, and it empowers the repressed. The other, in folklore, is welcomed into the everyday and woven into the fabric of our communities. It becomes an altered version of alterity, a homely version of the uncanny: an other that we can be intimate with.
In academic practice outside of folklore studies, folklore is commonly approached as the oral tradition of telling stories within a culture. But folklore is much broader than ‘lore’[1], and can be understood as anything from homemaking practices to folk medicine, marriage rituals, the use of talismans, birthing and funerary rites, games, and art and craft practices.
According to Michael Fortune, folklore, isn't just old stories; it is a living corpus of beliefs, practices, and narratives that exists somewhere in between tradition and the contemporary. It is intimately tied to community and place, and it is in a constant state of evolution and revision (Fortune 2025). Folklore then, is so much more than ‘lore’, but it is also much more than ‘folk’. Alan Dundes, in his essay ‘What Is Folklore?’ asserts that the folk of folklore are not rural, but contemporary urban people. Folklore, far from being a thing of the past, is constantly being created and recreated to suit new situations (Dundes, 1965: 2).
A cultural otherness can be seen to manifest in folklore itself - in its refusal to be defined, and in its dynamism and fluidity. And it is from this position of cultural alterity, that it presents a refracted image of society and its norms, allowing us to explore and challenge the boundaries of what is ‘normal’ and to examine dominant narratives and perspectives.
References
Dundes, Alan. 1965. The Study of Folklore. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall
Fortune, Michael. 2025. www.folklore.ie
[1] Understood as the knowledge passed from one generation to another within a cultural group.
The journal is now accepting submissions for a special issue on ‘Otherness and Folklore’, with publication planned for Autumn/ Winter 2026. It seeks contributions on otherness and folklore in all its forms, through a range of topics. These may include but are not confined to:
Festivals and rituals
Folk practices (including divination, folk medicine, homemaking, marriage and funerary rites, children’s games)
Folktales and storytelling
Theatre, costumes, guising
Music and performance art
Gender transgression
Decolonisation
Digital cultures
Visual arts and film
Literature
Submissions that are invited in their completed form can be:
Scholarly articles (5-8000 words).
Research that reflects on or integrates creative practice (max 8000 words).
Reviews on works related to folklore and related studies (500–1,500 words).
Poetry (up to three poems, no more than 5 pages).
Short prose (up to 1000 words).
The deadline for submissions is June 26, 2026.
All submissions should be sent electronically via email with Word document attachment and addressed to the issue Editor, Maria Beville, at otherness.research@gmail.com. Please include:
name, professional affiliation, phone number, and email address in the cover e-mail.
an abstract of 200-300 words.
a maximum of 5 keywords.
Manuscripts must conform to the Chicago Manual of Style, author-date system.
Scholars are always welcome to submit articles within the scope of the journal for consideration for our next general issue. There is currently a specific CFP for the next general issue (Spring 2026), and there will be a forthcoming CFP in the Spring for our next themed issue on Folklore and Otherness.
Please address any inquires to Matthias Stephan: otherness.research@gmail.com.
