Missouri Folklore Society Journal (Vols. 40-41): Emerging Folklorists - Missouri Folklore Society Journal

Emerging Folklorists showcases outstanding work done by Missouri college students from 2010-19.

These projects came primarily from folklore courses and capstones; most were presented at Missouri

Folklore Society conferences.




These papers represent a range of topics and approaches, from rigorously quantitative analyses to

humanistic studies that ask to be validated by the reader's recognition of sound insight and empathetic

understanding. They include oral history, family history, structural linguistics, archival study and a great

deal of fieldwork. Though the disciplines here range widely, we had in mind something comparable to

The Apprentice Historian, a model which the discipline of history provides to showcase

exceptional learners.




So Emerging Folklorists opens with a pre-med student contextualizing lore from her Girl Scout camp.

Next, an avid video gamer analyzes gamer language. The volume's seventeen essays include a linguistics

student tackling the linguistic structures of "Yo Momma" jokes, and a student of A. I. using computer

analysis to explore patterns of sounds and grammar in "Knock Knock" jokes. Another student uses brain-

imaging data to analyze the way subjects processed the humor of memes. An extraordinarily gifted gay

student collects, categorizes, and offers insight into "coming out" stories. Another researcher focuses on

1990s updates of the Bluebeard motif. A rural student (now a PhD in Literature) explores her county's

history, including oral accounts of farms and a factory, a Civil War skirmish, the cultural artifacts of

enslaved people. Another from southern Missouri collects stories from people of her grandparents' generation about racial confrontations in her home town. Many of the essays include appendices--data collected, transcriptions of interviews, etc., valuable in their own right.







Some of these inquiries are in spots "naïve" in the sense art historians use the term--work that shows the

marks of the newcomer, or that may not have the range of historical reference of more senior

practitioners, but work which rides on a freshness and a freedom from the preconceptions which can mark

professionals. These researchers are people still learning how to imagine their audience - they do not

always know what needs to be explained and what does not. But in folklore they have found one of the

places where an undergraduate can make genuine contributions to knowledge.