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Biography

Nicolas Le Bigre is Lecturer and Archivist at the Elphinstone Institute, working as programme co-ordinator for the MLitt (Master’s) in Ethnology and Folklore. He co-ordinates undergradatuate and postgraduate courses and regularly teaches both within and outwith the School of Language, Literature, Music, and Visual Culture. His research and publications cover topics such as migration, personal-experience narrative, street art and political materiality, ethnographic methodologies, and disciplinary history.

As Institute Archivist he supervises archival projects and cataloguing, consults with and advises regional and international partners, and liaises with internal and external researchers. His archival work extends to funded-academic projects like Aberlangs, Just Reverberations, and Coast-R, and he supports community projects through organisations like Four Pillars and Grampian Regional Equalities Council (GREC).

He is a member of the Executive Board of the Société Internationale d'Ethnologie et de Folklore (SIEF), is co-chair of the SIEF Working Group on Archives, and is a council member of The Folklore Society. He has been an advisor for various Scottish regional networks such as GREC and is on the council of the Friends of St Machar's Cathedral.

In addition to and as part of his academic work, Nicolas is involved in a number of public and long-term community engagement projects in Scotland, using the disciplines of Ethnology and Folklore to facilitate intercultural dialogue and build regional cultural confidence. As co-ordinator of the Polish-Scottish Song Group, organiser of the Elphinstone Institute Public Lecture Series, and co-organiser of the Aberdeen and Beyond Storytelling Festival, Nicolas helps organise over 60 events a year in the North-East of Scotland.

Prizes and Awards

• The Scottish Samurai, Legendary Award (2019)

Research Overview

My research interests include migration and immigrant folklore, personal-experience narrative, traditional folk narrative, memorialisation, street art and political material culture, the ethnography of walking, and vernacular religion.

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-ordinated 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: /elphinstone/public-engagement/LockdownLore.php

Street Art

I have published on graffiti/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, and the ethnography of walking.

Knowledge Exchange

Folklore, as a discipline, emphasises working in partnership with 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.

As organiser of the Elphinstone Institute Public Lecture Series I invite community experts to share their expertise and lived experience.

I also arrange monthly public storytelling events though the Aberdeen and Beyond Storytelling Festival, which I organise and host in partnership with the Grampian Association of Storytellers and the Scottish Storytelling Centre. We have hosted storytellers from across Scotland, as well as Ireland, Poland, Brazil, Pakistan, Brittany, Finland, Syria, and Canada.

As archivist, I have worked on community projects with groups such as Four Pillars (LGBT+ charity), Grampian Regional Equality Council, and the Scottish Council on Archives.

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 Folklore

EF5004 (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) - Ethnology and Folklore Dissertation (Course Co-ordinator)

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

FS1008 (Undergraduate) – Introduction to Visual Culture

Non-course Teaching Responsibilities

Personal Tutor