Professor Anthony Bak Buccitelli’s Roundtable Talk from Feb. 26, 2021 is now available on our Youtube channel. You may access it here.

Abstract: Theories of performance in the study of folklore, first articulated mainly in the context of face-to-face oral narration in the 1960s and 70s, were instrumental in shifting the study of everyday forms of expression from a “product” view (focusing on folklore as text) to a “process” or “communications” view (focusing on folklore as situated performance). Despite the terminology, the study of performance in folklore studies is less concerned with formal, staged performances, then with the dynamics of communication and social interaction between a “performer” and “audience” in everyday, informal settings. However, these influential theoretical frameworks at best do not fully suit, and at worst actively misinform, the study of everyday expression in online or hybrid online-offline settings. In previous research, I have made the case that folklorists should examine digital technologies as “places” of performance, rather than simply as “texts” transmitted online, or as recordings of offline human activity. In this lecture, I will turn to two other crucial but little-examined avenues for the study of folklore and the digital: the role of technology in everyday face-to-face performances and the creative construction of online folklore forms that are intended to provoke haptic responses in offline settings.

Anthony Bak Buccitelli is Associate Professor of American Studies and Communications at the Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg. He currently serves as Director of the Penn State's Center for Folklore, coordinator of its Graduate Certificate in Folklore and Ethnography, and editor of the international journal Western Folklore.

Buccitelli’s research centers on vernacular culture and communication, in connection with digital technology, memory, narrative, space and place, and race and ethnicity. He regularly teaches and lectures on topics in technology and culture, folkloristics, ethnography, and race and ethnicity. He is the author of the book City of Neighborhoods: Memory, Folklore, and Ethnic Place in Boston (2016, University of Wisconsin Press). He is also editor of Race and Ethnicity in Digital Culture: Our Changing Traditions, Impressions, and Expressions in a Mediated World (2017, Praeger Books), a two volume collection that explores the role of folklore in the changing definitions, practices, and performances of race and ethnicity in the digital age. He has published more than 20 research articles and scholarly book chapters, which have appeared in the Sage Research Methods Foundations, The Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife, Journal of American Folklore, Oral History, and Cultural Analysis, among other venues.