The Programme
Ritual, Folklore and Wellbeing
12th &13th June 2026
The Full Programme
(This is an in-person event. The programme may be subject to change)
Day 1: Friday 12th June
9:00 - 9:30
Coffee and Registration
11:00 - 12:30
Panel 1: Re-Enchanted Landscapes
Stephanie Allen: Rooted in Myth: Re-Enchanting Regeneration
María Verónica Laguna: Diasporic Placemaking as Healing and Resistance
Lally Macbeth: Wish You Were Here: A History of Knick-Knacks
12:30 - 1:30
Lunch (Not Provided)
1:30 - 3:00
Panel 2a: Experimental Archaeologies
Stephanie Cussans Moran: In Search of the Solar Goddess: reimagining Minoan (Bronze Age Cretan) ritual for ecological wellbeing practices
Paul Vivian & Shaun Holbrow: Recent fieldwork at the Nine Ladies Stone Circle
Sara Svati: Stones’ Listening: Trulli, Cosmology and the Poetics of Place
Panel 2b: Frolic, Misrule, and Creative Chaos
Katt Grover: Mischief, Misrule and the Magic Circle: Designing Ritualised Playful Disruption
Katie GoddenGreen: The Parish of Milk. Finding Folk in Frolicsome Frocks
Kim Piffy: Creative Agency as Free Will: Ritual, Art, and the Human Capacity to Choose Meaning
Workshops:
3:00 - 3:15
Tea Break
3:15 - 5:00
Panel 3a: Pilgrimage, Procession, Pageantry
Rosie May Jones: "Whose Green and Pleasant Land?" — Community Pageant as Creative Placemaking
Geraldine Hudson: On Common Pilgrimages and Contemporary Folk Lores
Ian Nesbitt: Pilgrimage as Hospicing: Walking Through the Debris of Modernity
Panel 3b: Making Communities
Jackie Morris: Fields of care - embodied responses to folkloric rural places through a participatory embroidery practice
Marie Hvozdecká: Traditional Culture as a Source of Resilience in the Urban Environment of Brno: The Case of the Folklore & City Project
The Museum of Roadside Magic: Myth Making & Rolling Stories
Penny Macbeth: Multi Story
Workshop:
Geraldine Hudson: Common Pilgrimage – embodied votive offering workshop
Closing Performance
Dr Su Fahy & Patricia Brien: A Reappraisal of Jill Smith Ritual & Performance Artist by introducing her Spiral Ritual Performance
7pm
Social Meet-Up
King Charles Pub
Day 2: Saturday 13th June
9:00 - 10.30
Panel 4a: Magical Material Practice
Beatrice Jarvis: Ritual in the Irish Bog: Somatic Stewardship and Deep-Time Practice
Rima Staines: BETWEEN: Crossing Thresholds of the Imagination with Art, Poetry & Hypnosis
Kate Walters: The Unfurling of Dreams
Sarah Bellisario:A holding space for recovery - Creative engagement with symbolic artefacts and ritual making
10:30 - 11:00
Tea Break
11:00 - 12:30
Panel 5a: Plants and Places
Jennie Syson: A Rooted Practice: Walled Gardens, Artists’ Studios and Seasonal Heterotopias
Jenny Carden: Folk medicine vs. Medical Herbalism - the importance of collective folk practice in health and healing
Joseph Walsh: Infinite scrolling to infinitesimal hawthorn berries
Bettina Borg Cardona: Sounding the landscape, dancing the cosmos: rituals of music and dance as ‘holistic’ healing practices at the ancient Greek sanctuary of Epidauros
Panel 5b: Haunted Landscapes
Hannah Singleton: Lancashire’s Corpse Path: memorialising the Pendle Witches within and through landscape
Darren Oldridge: Where the Bad Things Are: Haunted Places from the Reformation to The Shining
Melanie Rose: Views from a Painter’s Perspective: inherited memory, nostalgia, and the value of rural paintings in public collections
Workshops:
Sarah Bellisario: The Humannis Deck
12:30 - 1:30
Lunch (Not Provided)
1:30 - 3:00
6a: Folk Artefacts and Cultural Commons
Emalee Beddoes: Curating the mince: Folk practice in museums beyond aesthetic display
Becky Dodman Wainwright: Chumbé, cosmologies and the exploration of ancestral Colombian heritage: A new model for non-extractive (auto)ethnographic textile research
Chloe Lundrigan: Art is like good bread!: Hosting artists in folklore archives
6b: Writing Ourselves into the Land
Emma Carlow: Make‑Believe as Method: Imagined Landscapes, Collaborative Worlds, and the Therapeutic Power of Creative Fabrication
Sophie Parkes-Nield: It belongs to us all: considerations of creative writing with folklore
Rebecca Burns: A Deck of Local Belonging: Oracle Cards and the Therapeutic Potential of Ordinary Places
Workshops:
Jenny Carden: Plant Communication Meditation
Sigil Sisters: Sigil Ritual to be summoned, activated and forgotten
3:00 - 3:30
Tea Break
3:30 - 4:30
Plenary and Next Steps
The exhibition will be open for the duration of the symposium