On Shifting Ground: Migration, Disruption, and the Changing Contours of Home
Journal of Folklore and Education
2024: Volume 11
Michelle Banks and Sojin Kim, Guest Editors
About This Volume
Migration is not a straightforward, singular, linear process of leaving one place and arriving in another. Being on the move involves infinite motivations and circumstances. It always involves interaction, adaptation, creativity; it is multifaceted, multi-routed, sometimes circular or cyclical. And what we find resoundingly essential to recognize—whether we work in the classroom, at museums, or directly in community—is that all of us live and produce our senses of community, and by extension home, on shifting ground.
On Shifting Ground demonstrates how folklore and other traditional expressive forms offer tools, strategies, and resources for both responding to and catalyzing change. Whether adapting traditional expressive behavior to meet new circumstances during and after migration or asserting them to challenge the status quo, people productively leverage the durability and dynamic nature of culture to strengthen community life through changes of many sorts—whether political, social, environmental, or cultural.
Articles
Places, Words, Stories: Tracing Migration Pathways
Volume 11's Guest Editors identify themes from "On Shifting Ground," articulate the value of heritage as a resource for people on the move and in the aftermath of major life disruptions, and recognize the ways tradition and culture necessarily transform as a result of new exigencies and interactions.
Flood of Memory: Navigating Environmental Precarity Through Folklore and Filmmaking
This documentary considers how folk sources and community storytelling connect to the past and help reckon with an uncertain future through oral history interviews, archived home movie footage, and present-day visuals of the Manzanar Japanese concentration camp, situating histories of racial exclusion and displacement within broader frameworks of ecological disaster.
Manzanar, Diverted: Confluences of Memory and Place
A documentary filmmaker revisits the Manzanar Japanese concentration camp with a focus on today’s issues over water rights. Classroom applications encourage students to ponder their connections to place and mounting challenges of climate refuge, rising waters, pollution, or drought.
Teaching to Disrupt the Narrative of Presence: Multicultural Migrations to the Great Plains
Disrupting the narrative of presence on the Great Plains reveals substantive multicultural histories of migration to lands originally inhabited by Native peoples. Through the lenses of the diverse cultures inhabiting the region over four centuries, these histories expose hard truths of colonialism and racism in the Great Plains alongside narratives of BIPOC people seeking to make real dreams of survival, hope, and opportunity.
Son Útiles: Learning from Manito Sheep Culture
The work of scholars and community members to create a museum exhibition grounded in local history and culture included interviews, family photographs, traditional art, and presentations. They also developed an education guide aligned with New Mexico’s new social studies standards to comply with state and federal laws regarding the education of Native American and ELL students.
Educating From Scratch: Toward a Revitalized Bulgarian Village
This article investigates revitalization efforts in a Bulgarian village to understand how young newcomers use cultural exchange, heritage, and alternative educational programming to initiate change in rural spaces, and with what impacts.
Finding a Second Jia (Home): Language, Culture, Identity, and Belongingness from an International Student’s Perspective
This essay explores home through personal narratives of migration and identity from an international student. The author’s transnational and multilingual experiences reshaped their understanding of home beyond a singular or physical space. Implications for faculty and administrators in higher education are provided, including the need for ongoing support for international students.
I didn’t write this for you!: Using Translanguaging in Pages and in the Classroom
A folklorist addresses the legacy of Spanish language loss and the devaluing of people’s language practices by asserting the value of bicultural and biliterate ways of knowing and being by presenting and analyzing the poetry of Eddie Vega.
Teaching and Learning with Migrant and Refugee Students: A Conversation
Teachers are often on the frontline of creating spaces for migrant and refugee children to find community and construct a sense of place. In this conversation, a 4th-grade teacher and a former student, who came to her class from a refugee camp knowing no English, share how they learned from one another and forged a lasting bond.
Embracing the Choque: Pedagogical Disruptors in Folk Dance Instruction
The authors look to the choque, the literal crashing of the castanets together, as a metaphor for the collision of cultures, histories, practices, and values (Anzaldúa 1987) when concert dance and folk dance traditions coexist within the changing contours of an academic studio. They offer potential interdependent disruptors for folk dance practitioners to consider when teaching concert-trained dancers in Western academic spaces.
From the Printed Page to the Concert Stage: Migrant Poetry and Labor Songs as Public Folklore
Research on the life and work of a Swedish immigrant poet in the early 20th century became the basis for an interdisciplinary collaboration that produced songs based on her poems, informances, recordings, and a curriculum. The story is about history, heritage and how we relate to it, a song tradition, the labor movement and women’s place in it, and migration then and now.
The Dzaleka Art Project: A Community-Based Documentation Project in a Malawian Refugee Camp
A collaboration between youth in a refugee camp in Malawi, U.S. college students, and a professor of folklore has produced a website and forthcoming book manuscript. The project augments opportunities for the artists, all of whom are refugees or asylum seekers, to share their work, bring visibility to the talent in the camp, raise awareness about their lives as refugees, and educate people about the role of arts in migrants’ lives.
Blues People, Music, and Folklore: Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation
A folklorist, Blues scholar, and Blues musician has created an extensive interdisciplinary education website sharing the history, context, and production of Blues music.
Hearing Home Through a Podcast of Asian American Tales
Four Asian American folklorists launched "Yellow and Brown Tales: Asian American Folklife Today," a podcast that highlights the longstanding, rich diversity of Asian American experiences, creating a space for connecting, sharing stories, and finding a sense of home through discussions of foodways, music, and migration journeys.
Journal of Folklore and Education 2024 Reviews
Dropping In: What Skateboarders Can Teach Us About Learning, Schooling, and Youth Development, by Robert Petrone. | Play in a Covid Frame: Everyday Pandemic Creativity in a Time of Isolation, by Anna Beresin and Julia Bishop, eds. | Claiming Space: Performing the Personal through Decorated Mortarboards, by Sheila Bock.
Key Themes in This Issue
Memory, Place, Narrative, Identity, Immigration, Migration
The Journal of Folklore and Education (ISSN 2573-2072) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published annually by Local Learning: The National Network for Folk Arts in Education. JFE publishes work that uses ethnographic approaches to tap the knowledge and life skills of students, their families, community members, and educators in K-12, college, museum, and community education.