From Medievalism to Climate Change Apocalypse: Folkloristic Perspectives on Cultural Heritage, Disaster and Climate

Narratives are powerful cultural tools. They create the conditions for how we experience and cope with events and phenomena in our everyday lives, while these experiences engender narratives in their own turn. We study this topic using a number of themes as points of departure, the common denominator being these narratives and narrating. This course treats the production of cultural heritage in theory and practice, how folklore and narratives about the past constitute important elements in cultural heritage processes and the experience industry, and how e.g. ghost tourism, dramatised museum tours and Mediaeval festivals create history. The course also examines how narratives of disaster shape our understanding and reaction to disasters: narratives can have highly tangible impacts on a society's disaster response and people's lives in the shadow of disaster. During the course, we will discuss e.g. the Lisbon earthquake, Hurricane Katrina and narratives of climate change in this light.