‘Folklore and Anthropology in Conversation’
The Tenth Folklore Society – Royal Anthropological Institute Joint Seminar
Thursday 15 October, 2026, 10:00-17:00, at 50 Fitzroy Street, London W1T 5BT
This is a hybrid event. Booking available soon.
‘When Loud Rumour Speaks’:
Informal communication in the modern online world
Anthropologists know what it is to deal with networks of informal communication. Field research in small-scale, face-to-face social situations, be they villages, neighbourhoods or organisations, has always entailed coming to grips with this in one way or another. Folklorists, whether collecting ‘traditional’ oral material of various sorts or documenting urban and contemporary legends and the online world of memes and viral narratives, have always recognised the fundamental importance of informal communication.
Anthropology and folklore meet here in shared and long-standing interests in rumour, which have only been sharpened by the rise and rapid expansion of the Internet.
This meeting will consider the social roles of rumour in the broadest senses, whether comparatively or in case studies, and will explore what the two disciplines have in common in this respect, what they can learn from each other, and how, if at all, rumour has changed in the online era: are we witnessing the emergence of a new mode of communication, somewhere between the face-to-face/oral and the literate?
Presentations will be given in person, but conference attendees may attend either on-site, or via Zoom. There is no registration fee. For on-site attendees, refreshments and a light lunch will be provided free of charge.
Programme
09:30 Introduction
10:00-11:00 Session One:
Henrik Olinder (Swedish Civil Defence and Resilience Agency): Rumours during Uncertain Times
Dr Alexander Parkyn-Smith (University of Cumbria): Narratives of Uncertainty: Rumour, gossip and vernacular communication in response to the events of January 2022 in Almaty, Kazakhstan
11:00-11:30 Coffee
11:30-12:30 Session Two
Dr Katrine Nohr (University College London): ‘When Childbirth Stories Speak Loudest’: Rumour, Informal Knowledge, and the Circulation of Rights in Maternal Care
Dr Jessica Lloyd May (independent scholar): In Defence of Abigail Williams: The ongoing rumour mill of the Salem Witch Trials
12:30-14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:00 Session Three
Hannah Walton (independent scholar): Haunted Estates: Supernatural Rumour, Working-Class Memory and the Informal Archive in England
Dawn Brissenden (Leicester de Montfort University): Cryptid Continuum: The evolution of British cryptids from campfires to the digital realm.
15:00-15:30 Coffee
15:30-16:30 Session Three
Kirsty Asher (University of Hertfordshire): ‘You’re Not Going to Like the Answer’ – An Analysis of Vagueposting in Contemporary Social Media Communication
Dr Sohini Sengupta (Tata Inst. of Social Sciences): Fear and Enchantment: Rumours as Authentic Evidence on Public WhatsApp Groups
16:30-17:00 Closing Remarks and Discussion
Abstracts
Henrik Olinder (Swedish Civil Defence and Resilience Agency): Rumours during uncertain times
It is clear that in recent years people have become more interested in preparing themselves for different types of crises that may affect them and their country. Pandemics, the climate change and the war in Ukraine, to name a few, have obviously contributed to this. The ongoing war of words between different parties contributes to shifting in trust, changed media consumption and the emergence of an information vacuum. Countries are now starting to prepare for a possible major war. This means that citizens must be protected and the authorities must give instructions by actively conducting crisis communication. This occurs when public concern arises at the same time as rumours spread rapidly in traditional ways and in media platforms. Whether the rumours are credible or plausible it is something that citizens and authorities must assess. Under these circumstances, when citizens need information from authorities, trust is tested and the risk of public concern arises.
How do rumours affect our ability to manage crises? And how can governments and organizations respond to public concern in a constructive way? The new book Rumours on the Agenda – Managing Public Concern Through Crisis Communication provides some answers to these questions. The book offers both research-based knowledge and practical tools to meet one of the greatest communication challenges of our time. The book is the result of a multi-year project with the goal of improving organizations’ crisis management and changing the way we communicate during crises. It is the first of its kind to focus on rumours as a central factor in crisis communication – and how they affect both public behaviour and government actions.
In this presentation, results from a study on crisis communication, rumours and public concern will be discussed.
Dr Alexander Parkyn-Smith (University of Cumbria): Narratives of Uncertainty: Rumour, gossip and vernacular communication in response to the events of January 2022 in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Almaty, Kazakhstan, this paper explores how young urban middle-class respondents create vernacular narrative accounts of their lives in response to dramatic social, political and economic change and the threat of future existential risks. Conceptually, I draw on Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis (1959), developed by Scott into onstage/offstage categories (1985). My research found that a young post-Soviet generation created onstage narratives to provide structure, control and certainty in everyday life. However, ruptures to the everyday—such as a flood, earthquake, currency devaluation, or even a marriage—expose vulnerabilities only discussed in informal private contexts. Drawing on the anthropology of gossip and rumour (Besnier, 2009; Gluckman, 1963; Paz, 2009), I analyse offstage communication. When faced with uncertainty, research participants turned first to trusted relations such as kin and close family. When these sources could not provide answers, rumour and gossip took on a significant role, allowing public discussion of uncertainty without destabilising onstage narratives.
This paper focuses on an anthropological case study of the January 2022 events of Almaty, Kazakhstan, when a violent government crackdown on public protest produced intense uncertainty. Drawing on new interviews and analysis of online information flows on Telegram channels, forums, WhatsApp discussions and a government–sponsored feature film, I bring this case study into a discursive space to explore how the conceptual and analytical frameworks offered by the study of folklore could further our understanding of narratives of uncertainty.
Dr Katrine Nohr (University College London): ‘When Childbirth Stories Speak Loudest’: Rumour, Informal Knowledge, and the Circulation of Rights in Maternal Care
Anthropological work on childbirth has long recognised the central role of storytelling in shaping women’s expectations, fears, and strategies of care. Drawing on comparative ethnographic research with mothers in Tanzania and the United Kingdom, this paper examines how informal communication—childbirth stories, whispered warnings, peer advice, and digitally mediated narratives—functions as a form of rumour that travels alongside, and often against, formal biomedical and human-rights discourses. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation, the paper shows that most mothers did not primarily engage with human rights through formal legal knowledge or institutional mechanisms. Instead, understandings of “what is safe,” “what is dangerous,” and “what one can demand” were produced and circulated through informal networks: conversations between women after birth, maternity ward anecdotes, WhatsApp groups, antenatal classes, and online forums. These narrative exchanges operated as a hybrid communicative mode— neither purely oral nor fully institutional—through which experiential knowledge was collectively evaluated, moralised, and transmitted. In Tanzania, childbirth rumours about abusive staff, abandoned patients, or fatal outcomes shaped women’s risk calculations and discouraged overt rights-claiming during labour. In the UK, digitally amplified birth stories—often framed as trauma narratives—produced a parallel economy of expertise that both empowered women and intensified anxiety, contributing to post-birth complaint cultures. Across both sites, rumour did not function as misinformation but as a pragmatic, socially embedded form of knowledge-making under conditions of uncertainty and power asymmetry. By situating childbirth stories as folklore-like narratives with real social effects, this paper argues that informal communication is central to how rights are interpreted, negotiated, and resisted in practice. It contributes to debates on rumour by showing how contemporary maternal knowledge circulates in a space between face-to-face storytelling and online virality, reshaping authority, trust, and agency in modern healthcare settings.
Dr Jessica Lloyd May (independent scholar): In Defence of Abigail Williams: The ongoing rumour mill of the Salem Witch Trials
Rumour was central to the unfolding of the Salem Witch Trials, shaping accusations, testimony, and public perceptions in ways that had devastating consequences. More than three centuries later, the same event continues to circulate through informal channels of communication, but now within the algorithmic environments of social media. Contemporary platforms reward sensationalism, simplified narratives, and emotionally engaging content, allowing historical rumours and long-discredited interpretations to reach new audiences with remarkable speed.
This paper examines how social media has become a site for the continual reinvention of Salem’s history. Popular content frequently revives the disproven ergot poisoning theory as an explanation for the trials, presents Abigail Williams as the calculating architect of the persecutions, or reframes those executed as historical witches whose identities are reclaimed by contemporary magical practitioners, rather than as victims of a miscarriage of justice. These narratives privilege compelling storytelling over historical evidence, illustrating how online informal communication perpetuates myths that have become culturally embedded despite scholarly challenges.
By exploring the intersection of folklore, digital culture, and public history, this paper argues that social media functions as a contemporary rumour mill, where historical events are continually reshaped through repetition, reinterpretation, and viral circulation. In doing so, it considers how the modern transmission of folklore and misinformation influences public understandings of the past, demonstrating that the mechanisms through which rumour gains authority have evolved in form rather than function. Through case studies drawn from TikTok, Instagram, and online witchcraft communities, this paper explores how folklore, rumour, and platform algorithms combine to create persuasive but historically inaccurate narratives, raising broader questions about authority, authenticity, and the digital afterlives of historical events.
Hannah Walton (independent scholar): ‘Haunted Estates: Supernatural Rumour, Working-Class Memory and the Informal Archive in England.
This paper examines supernatural rumour in working-class communities in England as a form of informal communication that does social work. Focusing on council estates, post-war housing landscapes and their digital afterlives, it asks how stories about haunted flats, dangerous stairwells, uncanny underpasses, ‘bad’ houses and returning presences circulate as more than entertainment. I argue that such narratives can be read as vernacular care: they warn, socialise, memorialise and help residents navigate place-stigma, neglect and uncertainty.
Bringing folklore studies into conversation with cultural heritage, oral history, urban geography and digital culture, the paper treats supernatural rumour as a moving category between rumour, legend, warning and neighbourhood talk. Indicative examples include estate-based oral memories, childhood warning narratives tied to routes and thresholds, and public digital materials such as local Facebook threads, comment cultures around paranormal media, and urban-exploration videos and retellings. Across these settings, rumours work as an informal archive through which working-class memory attaches itself to ordinary infrastructure. Methodologically, the paper is exploratory and interpretive. It draws on folklore scholarship, oral-history collections, heritage policy work on living heritage, and a small pilot set of publicly accessible digital examples. Rather than asking whether a place is “really” haunted, it asks what these stories do: how they encode social knowledge, attach memory to everyday housing, and convert ordinary built environments into informal heritage. In doing so, the paper speaks directly to the seminar’s interest in the social roles of rumour across oral and online worlds.
Dawn Brissenden (Leicester de Montfort University): Cryptid Continuum: The evolution of British cryptids from campfires to the digital realm
In the digital age the way that we communicate and form communities is ever changing. While some may question whether folklore can continue to exist with an increasing amount of communication occurring online, folklorists acknowledge that wherever communication occurs folklore can exist and be created. This presentation will provide an overview of my PhD project in which I am exploring the evolution of British cryptids from oral tradition into contemporary digital representations, specifically through the use of YouTube as an archive. This presentation will also consider rumour and hoax in the narratives around British cryptids. This project considers how, and in what ways, social media can be used as a tool for the preservation and remediation of folkloric creatures.
Kirsty Asher (University of Hertfordshire): ‘You’re Not Going to Like the Answer’–An Analysis of Vagueposting in Contemporary Social Media Communication
Vagueposting has emerged as a significant Internet communication trend in 2026. Previously known as Vaguebooking due to its connections with Facebook, the early form of the term was associated with cries for help or attention-seeking in withholding key information from Facebook statuses. Since 2025, vagueposting has now developed into a viral Internet trend through which misinformation and rumour is facilitated in the expansive lack of key information. This trend is coinciding with social media being increasingly charged by algorithmically-driven engagement, and Internet oral tradition being appropriated for clicks and likes. This presentation will present a case study on contemporary vagueposting on X (formerly Twitter) as an emerging form of viral narrative. Focusing particularly on posts which encourage speculation about a certain subject, I will demonstrate how vagueposting engages with human curiosity, contributes to a development in Internet meme culture, and has the capacity to create unfounded rumours. Additionally, this presentation will confront the notion that social media which prioritises viral engagement is contributing to an oral tradition which is compromised and inauthentic, and the increasingly negative effect this has on Internet users as individuals, and on broader online human interaction.
Dr Sohini Sengupta (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai): Fear and Enchantment: Rumours as Authentic-Evidence on Public WhatsApp Groups.
The proposed article combines the insights from long-term ethnographic fieldwork with tribal communities in east central India, among whom oral story telling is common and more recent work with urban public WhatsApp groups. Rumour viewed as contested form of knowledge featured in the statements, stories and accounts that circulated through the communicative practices of both groups through which they explained critical and unusual events, speculated on the true nature of occurrences and competed by producing claims and counter claims. Rumours became widespread on WhatsApp groups (over 800 million users in India), with the penetration of smartphones in 2018.
Realistic and fantastic accounts spread through WhatsApp as participants exchanged videos, photos, texts and voice notes at an unprecedented speed through networks of trust: family, schools, work and community. Aiding the positive reception of such information was middle class tech-utopian beliefs, stakes in the knowledge economy, the desire for global connections and competitive witnessing and transmitting of critical events. New media scholarship has well established how the status enhancing and belief confirming ‘positive’ narratives enables disinformation and misinformation. The focus of this contribution departs from the ‘post-truth’ perspective by focusing on the special attributed of rumours as moral stories, in this case accounts that contain warnings about children in danger and the contamination of food. In the tribal communities, similar rumours (children and food) may put vulnerable marginal groups at risk, and both the spreaders and victims of rumours, as accused persons could be labelled as witches or troublemakers.
In WhatsApp groups, rumours played a different social role: aspiring to gain credibility as the more authentic template for obtaining knowledge and asserting its status as evidence based on the testimonies of trust-worthy and high-status individuals and authorities (elites, leaders, professionals, celebrities and officials). Drawing insight from the philosophical debates on the nature of ‘Ad Populum’ (Walton 1980, Godden 2008), this contribution tries to examine the justificatory grounds for these stories in the selected communities. New media affordances through what anthropologists describe as ‘scalable sociality’ and ‘context collapse’ (Daniel Miller) increased the viability of rumours as mainstream knowledge based on three claims, a) must be true because it is popular, b) must be true because it described real events based on reliable evidence and c), even if the specifics were proven to be untrue, the moral message was valuable for the community.
Image: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/yarn-phone-communication-network-2091195/