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Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper aims at approaching the topic of uncertainties arising from major crises (mainly Covid pandemics and the war in Ukraine), analysing the levels of ruptures and shifts produced in the work of the Cluj- Napoca (Romania) Folklore Archive’s researchers in this context.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I attempt at analysing how and why the new social and political contexts, producing various anxieties, generated new domain approaches, the selection of new topics, meanwhile triggering new methodological and theoretical interrogations. How specifically Folklore/Ethnology as fields of study are in reshaping/reconfiguring processes and mostly, to which extents it happens so- are the main research questions of the proposed paper. Related to them, I am going to address other interrogations regarding the historical continuities and discontinuities in the researchers’ works around this Archive, comparing the current changes and challenges of the discipline with the ones produced in the past, in other unfavourable circumstances (totalitarian period for instance). Through these, I attempt to put all these topics in a comparative frame, underlining the specificities of the nowadays ones and their challenges, placing them as adequate as possible in the new social, cultural and geopolitical contexts.

What are their means and meanings in the researchers’ perspectives: how and why these new topics appeared, how specifically they are or are not integrated in the “traditional“ ones? - are all questions derived from the main ones, systematically addressed in this paper. Meanwhile, following the researchers’ views, through interviewing them, I intend to discuss their new understandings regarding doing fieldwork, the meanings of documenting the new materials in the Archive, as well as the significances and limitations of the nowadays Archive digitisation processes, envisaging the development of this institution.