BA Hons, MLitt, OSS
Lecturer
- About
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- Email Address
- n.lebigre@abdn.ac.uk
- Office Address
The Elphinstone Institute
MacRobert Building
King's College
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen AB24 5UA
Tel: 01224 272997- School/Department
- School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture
Biography
I am the Programme Co-ordinator for the MLitt in Ethnology and Folklore and have worked at the Elphinstone Institute since 2016. I am the Elphinstone Institute's archivist, a role through which I accession new materials, supervise archival projects and cataloguing, consult with and advise regional and international partners, and liaise with internal and external researchers. I host and organise many of the Institute's public engagement initiatives, including its Public Lecture Series, storytelling events, and the Polish-Scottish Song Group. I help maintain the Elphinstone Institute's social media platforms and, alongside Institute administrator, Alison Sharman, maintain the Institute's website.
I am a Council Member of The Folklore Society and am on the board of the SIEF Working Group of Archives.
Born and raised in Washington, D.C., USA, I am French-American and moved to Scotland in 2010.
Qualifications
- MLitt Ethnology and Folklore2011 - University of AberdeenMLitt with Distinction - Dissertation Topic: Polish Immigrant-Experience Narratives in North-East Scotland
- BA (Hons) East Asian Studies, Aboriginal (Indigenous) Studies, French2005 - University of Toronto
Memberships and Affiliations
- Internal Memberships
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- Honorary Curatorial Fellow, Museums and Special Collections
- Member of the Teaching and Learning Committee of the School of Language, Literature, Music, and Visual Culture
- Member of the Learning and Teaching Network
- External Memberships
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- The Folklore Society – Council Member
- Eurethno – Scotland Representative
- SIEF Working Group on Archives – Board Member
- International Council on Archives – Member
- International Society for Folk Narrative Research – Member
- Grampian Regional Equalities Council, Research, Policy, and Practice Advisory Network – Member
- American Folklore Society – Member
- Société Internationale d'Ethnologie et de Folklore (SIEF) - Member
- Scottish Records Association – Member
- Federation of Folk and Traditional Music Collections – Founding Member
- North East Scotland Heritage Network – Member
- The Folklore Fellows (Finnish Academy of Science and Letters) – Associate Member
Prizes and Awards
- The Scottish Samurai, Legendary Award (2019)
- Research
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Research Overview
My research interests include personal-experience narrative, immigration and immigrant folklore, oral history, vernacular religion, memorialisation, and political material culture.
Current Research
Immigrant-Experience Narratives
I research the personal-experience narratives of immigrants in Scotland. Through these narratives, I examine broad concepts of immigrant experience, such as home, space and time, religion and spirituality, as well as the movement and interconnectedness of place and people. This research is not a collection of statistical data, but rather an attempt to consider and understand individuals' creative expressions of and interactions with everyday life in Scotland. In other words, I document and try to understand how people express their experiences of immigration through their own stories about their lives.
Lockdown Lore Collection Project
I co-ordinate the Lockdown Lore Collection Project, which is an archival collection (crowdsourced) project launched in April 2020. The project has collected creative responses to the coronavirus pandemic and has received over 3000 submissions from around the world. Supplementing these contributions are the over seventy interviews conducted by a team of volunteer fieldworkers. Read more about the project here: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/elphinstone/public-engagement/LockdownLore.phpStreet Art
I have recently published on street art in relation to the disicplines of Ethnology and Folklore, examing in particular political examples from my own fieldwork in the streets of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen. I consider these examples – dealing with themes like the pandemic, Scottish independence, Black Lives Matter, transrights, anti-misogyny, gentrification – through the concepts of temporality, placement, and modification.
Knowledge Exchange
Folklore, as a discipline, emphasizes responsibility to contributors and community. With that in mind, I have coordinated the Polish-Scottish Song Group at the Elphinstone Institute since the autumn of 2012. The group exists to promote the exchange of traditional Scottish and Polish culture through the sharing of song. The group has performed across Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, and continues to grow every year.
I also organise annual storytelling events, including the Aberdeen event in the Scottish International Storytelling Festival, sponsored by the Scottish Storytelling Centre. We have hosted storytellers from across Scotland, as well as Poland, Brazil, Pakistan, Brittany, and Canada.
I am also an enthusiastic volunteer in wider-community events, and have filmed and recorded for community groups and festivals.
Supervision
I supervise MLitt students in the completion of their MLitt dissertations.
A list of completed dissertations at the Elphinstone Institute can be found here: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/elphinstone/programmes-study/dissertations.php
- Teaching
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Courses
Teaching Responsibilities
I am programme co-ordinator for the Elphinstone Institute's MLitt in Ethnology and Folklore and am course co-ordinator for its undergraduate Scottish Folklore and Oral Traditions courses. Subjects that I teach include 'major' and 'minor' narrative genres (e.g. folktales, legends, jokes), personal-experience narrative, immigrant folklore, digital folklore, ethnographic film theory, memorialisation and political materiality, fieldwork practice and theory, and cataloguing and archiving.
EF5003 (MLitt) - History, Core Genres, and Methodologies of Ethnology and FolkloreEF5004 (MLitt) - Perspectives on Tradition, Identity, and Fieldwork (Course Co-ordinator)
EF5503 (MLitt) - Oral Traditions (Course Co-ordinator)
EF5504 (MLitt) - Intellectual and Practical Approaches to Scottish Contexts
EF5901 (MLitt) - Dissertation Supervision
EF2501 (Undergraduate) - Scottish Folklore and Oral Traditions (Course Co-ordinator)
EF3501 (Undergraduate) - Scottish Folklore and Oral Traditions (Course Co-ordinator)
EF4501 (Undergraduate) - Scottish Folklore and Oral Traditions (Course Co-ordinator)
HI552l (MLitt) - Approaching Archives
Non-course Teaching Responsibilities
Personal Tutor
- Publications
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Round Table Discussion: Music & Migration
Contributions to Conferences: Oral PresentationsMaking Space for Community Groups to Access and Shape Archives
Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Conference ProceedingsResistance through the Temporality, Placement, and Modification of Street Art in Scotland’s Streets
Ethnologia Fennica, vol. 50, no. 1Contributions to Journals: ArticlesPlay and Vulnerability in Scotland during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Play in a COVID-19 Frame: Everyday Pandemic Creativity in a Time of Isolation. Beresin, A., Bishop, J. (eds.). Open Book Publishers, pp. 239-364, 25 pagesChapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters (Peer-Reviewed)Postscript: Suggestions for Those Who Work and Play with Children, Youth and Adults
Play in a Covid Frame: Everyday Pandemic Creativity in a Time of Isolation. Beresin, A., Bishop, J. (eds.). Open Book Publishers, pp. 457–478, 22 pagesChapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings: Chapters (Peer-Reviewed)Settling In and Creating Home in the North-East of Scotland
Contributions to Conferences: Oral PresentationsContesting ‘Integration’: Personal-Experience Narratives of Scotland’s Immigrants
Cambio. Rivista sulle trasformazioni sociali, vol. 11, pp. 29-39Contributions to Journals: ArticlesWhy Tell Stories?
Contributions to Conferences: Oral PresentationsConsidering Contributions of Traditions Archives to a Scottish Traditional Music Archive
Contributions to Conferences: Oral PresentationsDigital Humanities: Thinking and Acting Ethically in Ethnology and Folklore Studies
Contributions to Conferences: Oral Presentations- [ONLINE] https://youtu.be/Iczy6iYOmlQ