Voices of Folklore

Matilda Siebrecht hosts the #FinallyFriday podcast on folklore, featuring Colleen Deatherage (University of Alberta) and Ieva Pīgozne (Institute of Latvian History). They explore folklore’s academic and practical relevance, linking it to archaeology, cultural heritage, and modern traditions. Ieva highlights Latvia's vast folklore archives and its deep-rooted traditions, while Colleen discusses using folklore in modern healthcare and cultural identity. Both advocate interdisciplinary approaches to studying folklore and emphasize its role in preserving cultural memory. This marks the final #FinallyFriday episode before the podcast evolves in different format.

Colleen is based in Canada at the University of Alberta, St. Stephen's College. Having retrained as a folklorist in her doctorate, she combines that training with her experience in healthcare and social work to investigate the role of folklore in both the present and the past. Her current work focuses on meaning-making and how that is represented in material culture, with a particular interest in textiles and domestic arts law.

Ieva is a dress historian based in Latvia, where her current research at the Institute of Latvian History focusses on traditional dress of the 18th and 19th century. She completed a PhD in archaeology, where her thesis looked at colours and their meanings in 3rd to the 13th century Baltic dress. She has also always been interested in the way that cultural history and social anthropology can use folklore as a source for better understanding past material culture.