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- Convenors:
-
Ian Brodie
(Cape Breton University)
Sofia Wanström (Åbo Akademi University)
Jakob Löfgren
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Short Abstract
Contemporary legend addresses the worldview of the group, by challenging the institutional knowledges “they” have encouraged and/or building on the biases and perspectives “we” maintain despite them. This panel explores the ongoing social relevance of the most modern of vernacular folk genres.
Long Abstract
Legends are opportunities for the negotiation of realities: there is an event that does not unfold the way we would anticipate, and as one of us puts it into words to communicate it to another, we collectively attempt to make sense of it. In time—in retelling—the ambiguities and uncertainties may have settled and it is told as much for its verbal artistry as for urgently communicating its semantic content. What keeps a contemporary legend in circulation? Whether it has been disproven as “fact,” even whether it has hopped genres to joke or to a purported personal experience narrative, the legend lives largely by re-affirming our worldview, replete with both our biases and our aspirations. These rarely wholly align with what institutional culture expects from us: they are vernacularly cultivated and implicitly communicated through creative forms. The legend’s drama, therefore, is about encounter with the other, that which challenges us: other genders, other sexualities, other ethnicities, other nationalities, other political affiliations, and other realms such as the environment, the natural, and the supernatural. The papers in this panel, whether through individual case studies or overviews of the form, explore what legends say about a group’s nature.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Sunday 14 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
As an intimate genre, legend anticipates a relationship between teller and listener thicker than that between both teller and listener and a third party, whether that be a character within the account or an imagined other, who interprets the utterance otherwise. In contrasts, our nature is explored.
Paper long abstract
Contemporary legends are recreated scripts told in intimate contexts: "I" (who has, in your eyes, some kind of identity and embodies some kind of rationale to be heeded) shape my words to best tell "you" (who have, in my eyes, some kind of identity and some kind of rationale for needing to hear it) of the events of a purported incident. This is as true for direct face-to-face encounter as it is for social media as it is for print publication although, knowing my audience to likely be larger, I shape it best for multiple identities. The purported incident is incongruous with expectations: were everyone involved to act as we know best to act the event would have ended predictably. To establish its comprehensibility and resolve that incongruity, we (singularly or collaboratively) bring something else to our interpretations, a way of seeing the world that would provide the motivations that led to that outcome. We know that way is not universally held, and is subject to doubt, a doubt that may be ours or theirs. While we may inevitably take a stand on the truth or falsity (or fictiveness) of the narrative, it is the assertion of its contested plausibility ("I see why some people would believe this." "I see why some people would not.") that reveals contrast. Lest this sound too Pollyannaish, the same interpretive exercise can reveal contrast between teller and listener, further contextualising that relationship and utterances to come.
Paper short abstract
QR codes function as visible portals—gates to other realms (surveillance, the supernatural, the social). Using ostension, risk perception, and technological imaginaries, the paper shows how scanning performs encounters that negotiate group worldviews and contest institutional knowledge.
Paper long abstract
Once imagined as simple tools for convenience, QR codes have taken on a stranger cultural life. Their sudden ubiquity has made them more than inert links: they are increasingly read and enacted as gateways to other realms. Online and offline, a code may appear in expected contexts (restaurant menus, official notices) or suddenly out of place (a sticker on a lamppost, a stencil on a wall). In these moments, QR codes invite speculation and generate legend-like narratives. They are seen as portals to surveillance or phishing, as doors to uncanny or “cursed” content, or as cryptic markers that divide insiders from outsiders.
These vernacular readings show how a mundane technical sign becomes a threshold to “the other.” Framed through ostension, technological imaginaries, and symbolic boundaries, scanning emerges as a performative act—an embodied test that can confirm, resist, or reshape belief, describing a group’s nature.
Drawing on digital ethnography (viral posts, comment threads) and human–computer interaction (HCI) research on QR trust, this paper identifies three processes sustaining QR-code legends: (1) symbolic inscription — portal-like meaning ascribed to the matrix; (2) enacted verification — ostensive scanning, avoidance, and warning; and (3) institutional friction — vernacular readings that contest official assurances of safety. Together, these processes show how ordinary technologies generate contemporary legend forms, staging encounters with “other natures” while amplifying collective anxieties about surveillance, digital mediation, and institutional authority.
Paper short abstract
Depictions of disability in narrative folklore stereotype and erase, with many representations of disability as a punishment or flaw. Scholars have studied the notion of the supercrip, someone empowered by their disability, as gendered in fairy tale, which this paper extends to contemporary legend.
Paper long abstract
Depictions of disability in narrative folklore stereotype and erase, with fairy tales and legends in particular offering many ableist representations: disability as a punishment or flaw. Disability theory offers several useful paradigms, including the notion of the supercrip, someone empowered by their disability, which is notable here as it rarely appears with women. This paper investigates the relationship between gender and the supercrip, attempting to ascertain some of the earliest instances of this figure in folk narrative by surveying fairy tales from canonical oral and literary traditions as well as American contemporary legends. While the notion has been taken up by some fairy-tale scholars (notably Schmiesing), it has not yet been applied to legend studies, and thus this paper will focus on contemporary legends from North America, featuring the bodies of characters infected with debilitating diseases or featuring prosthetic hooks for hands—both primarily men, thus cementing gendered associations with extraordinary bodies.
Tentative bibliography
Bennett, Gillian. Bodies: Sex, Violence, Disease, and Death in Contemporary Legend. 1st ed., University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Goldstein, Diane E. Once Upon a Virus: Aids Legends and Vernacular Risk Perception. Utah State University Press, 2004.
Grue, Jan. “Ablenationalists Assemble: On Disability in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 15 no. 1, 2021, p. 1-17.
Schalk, Sami. “Reevaluating the Supercrip.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 2016, pp. 71–86.
Schmiesing, Ann. Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Wayne State University Press, 2014.
Paper short abstract
This paper will offer a historical reading of a range of western film narratives, from the US and beyond, focusing on their narrative and aesthetic conventions and subversions concerning the construction of visual socio-cultural spaces for natural history and the environment.
Paper long abstract
Film history is rich in conceptualizations of nature and the environment. Among different genres, westerns have been largely overlooked as sources of information for historical and socio-cultural scrutiny concerning processes of production, circulation, and management of narratives about nature. However, this film and literary genre has been and arguably still is providing scenographies of nature that have been extremely influential as unequivocally rooted in a wide range of historically contingent constructions and interrogations of narratives about the environment, broadly understood.
This paper will offer a historical reading of a range of western film narratives, from the US as well as from the genre’s multiple connections and offshoots mainly made in South America, Europe and East Asia, focusing on their narrative and aesthetic conventions and subversions, and paying attention to concurrent socio-political and scientific ideas and concerns regarding the environment. I will situate these narratives in specific historical contexts of film (and, later on, television) production, establishing significant links with processes of construction of visual socio-cultural spaces for natural history and, in parallel, with our multidimensional views and debates about nature and the environment.
Paper short abstract
A debate on masculinity, and the nature thereof have run rampant online. In the forums an ongoing process of gamification of stories is taking place. By using the genre of legend, the paper aims to discuss the construction of common sense within the manosphere.
Paper long abstract
In latter years the debate on masculinity, and the nature thereof have, from a want of better description, run rampant in online forums, on YouTube and public discourse, fueling a process of othering and identity construction in what is collectively understood as the manosphere. In the manosphere there is an ongoing process of gamification of language and utterances that can be likened to the process of memorate construction, through fabulate to legend. This process constructs common sense consensus(es) on the nature of masculinities.
In my paper I will demonstrate how the folkloristic use of genre as method (c.f. Erikssen & Kverndokk 2022) can be utilized to decipher the play with words and genre construction within online manosphere groups. By subjecting the stories told to a discussion on the construction of legend, fabulates, memorates and erinnerungssage (Taghlierini 1995, Degh & Vázsonyi 1974), one may not only better understand the gamification of storytelling in-group, but also illuminate processes of othering gender(s) and identity construction of masculinities (ranging from the loser to the gentleman) in an ongoing negotiation on the nature of masculinities.
By using stories collected from online forums as examples I will show how storytelling is used to construct common sense regarding the nature(s) of masculinity, demonstrating in the process how gamification of storytelling can be interpreted in the light of contemporary legend scholarship.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how international Covid-19 conspiracy narratives were localized in Norwegian anti-lockdown Facebook groups, showing how contemporary legends and rumors functioned as identity work by constructing “us/them” boundaries drawing “us/them” through essentialist portrayals of actors.
Paper long abstract
Conspiracy narratives related to Covid-19 circulated widely across digital platforms during the pandemic, often building on already familiar conspiracy plots. Like all vernacular storytelling, their meaning and resonance depended on local reinterpretations. This paper examines how such narratives were localized and adapted within Norwegian anti-lockdown Facebook groups, focusing on the collaborative identity work performed through rumours and contemporary legends.
The empirical basis is a digital ethnographic study of approximately 5,000 posts collected from public Norwegian Facebook groups critical of pandemic measures. While this database provides the foundation for the project, the analysis centers on close readings of a selected corpus of posts. This approach highlights how narrative detail and rhetorical strategies function as cultural practices of sense-making, rather than isolated texts.
Previous research has shown that conspiracy theories often gain plausibility by constructing essentialist portraits of actors. My earlier work on conspiracy narratives demonstrated how claims rested on assumptions about the inherent “nature” of elites and institutions. This resonates with Campion-Vincent’s observation that modern conspiracy culture frequently frames elites as “evil others.”
In the Norwegian case, I examine how global conspiracy motifs are reconfigured in a high-trust society with strong welfare institutions. Group discourse creates a sense of “us” (the skeptical, truth-seeking community) against “them” (government officials, health professionals, scientific elites – and the “sheeple” who trust and follow them). These narratives function as contemporary legends that dramatize encounters with the other and articulate cultural tensions about authority, trust, and belonging.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores the lives of and the living with two parakeet species in Amsterdam’s Oosterpark, known locally as “green parrots.” Blending observations of birds and people, it examines how urban myths, personal observations, and sometimes facts shape relations with nature in the city.
Paper long abstract
Over 5,000 ring-necked and Alexandrine parakeets reside in Amsterdam’s Oosterpark, locally known for their large numbers and shrieking calls. Locally referred to as “green parrots,” they are often perceived as invasive, hostile to native birds and a threat for agriculture. Their origin stories are equally mythologized, ranging from epic tales of Jimi Hendrix, the 17th century ships to a mysterious bird breeder and an attic in a canal house. In urban settings, truth and myth often live side by side.
The research project Thinking with Birds investigated how urban history can include natural histories, with the parakeets of the Oosterpark as one of the case studies. Through field workshops, lectures, and collaborations with birders, ‘bird ladies,’ and local residents, the project gathered a wide array of narratives. These stories revealed both the diversity of public perceptions as well as exoticising narratives.
This paper presents those narratives and explores how different ways of knowing, embodied and theoretical, local and global, personal and public, can blend when it comes to our imagined relation with these birds. The parakeets may not invite direct conversation, but they spark imagination, frustration, and the reproduction of shared urban myths - revealing how human and nonhuman lives intertwine in public spaces.
Ultimately, the paper suggests that “thinking with birds” can connect various forms of knowledge and use myth not as falsehood, but as a catalyst for curiosity, which is especially needed when it comes to a more critical re-imagining of our relationship with nature.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how the motif of “Motif of Quest: Travel and Wandering” serves as a bhakti modality in the case studies based on the lives of Akkamahadevi and Allamaprabhu projecting them as fallible human beings as they undergo spiritual transformation during their travels.
Paper long abstract
The motif of wandering presents a space for transformation and spiritual growth in religious literature across the world. These journeys are a test of endurance and heightened spiritual awakening in the lives of saints. This paper a proposes the notion of Hagiographic Folk Motif (HFM), entailing one such motif namely “Motif of Quest: Travel and Wandering.” The conceit of HFM is inspired from the idea of the motif index in folklore studies developed by Antti Aarne (1910) and Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature (1932-1936), the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index. The HFM charts life struggles, spiritual quests and victories in the lives of the saint protagonists presenting them as fallible heroes who inspire devotion among the followers. While bhakti at its core can be understood as loving devotion to God. It is found on a relationship of trust and love towards a personal god or a supreme being. (Radhakrishnan 1948, 58); Modality on the other hand can be contextualized as culturally embedded grassroot expressions rooted in vernacular religious expression of bhakti. Thus, this paper considers the transformative power of the "Motif of Quest" as a bhakti modality in the select fictionalized biographies as case studies based on the lives of Akkamahadevi and Allamaprabhu , hailing from the Vīraśaiva sects in medieval Karnataka, India. Furthermore, it explores how bhakti modality presents these saints not as distant, idealized spiritual icons but as embodied, fallible human beings as they undergo spiritual transformation during their travels.
Key Words: Saint Narratives; Wandering; Pilgrimage; Vīraśaiva; Bhakti Modality