COMMON LORE: The Working-Class Folklore Zine
COMMON LORE: The Working-Class Folklore Zine is a new project celebrating the folklore carried through working-class life: ghost stories, estate rumours, family sayings, local legends, warnings, jokes, superstitions, memories and informal histories.
what is COMMON LORE?
COMMON LORE is being developed as a zine, community and live cultural space for working-class artists, researchers, writers, storytellers and folklorists.
It exists to challenge the idea that folklore belongs only in universities, museums, archives, publishing spaces or established arts networks. Folklore lives in everyday people’s lives - in homes, estates, workplaces, pubs, playgrounds, schools, kitchens, bus stops, family stories and local rumours.
COMMON LORE is not about extracting stories from working-class communities. It is about creating a space where working-class people can publish, perform, preserve and define their own folklore.
while zines were not created only by working-class people, they have long been used by people outside mainstream publishing. they have been central to working-class youth cultures, punk and football fanzines, as well as activist publishing, feminist and queer movements, and other spaces where people have needed to make their own media on their own terms.
around half of UK adults identify as working-class, yet fewer than one in ten UK arts workers have working-class roots - and in museums, archives and libraries, the figure falls to just 5.2%
why working-class folklore?
Folklore is often treated as something that needs to be collected, studied or legitimised by institutions. But many of its most powerful forms are carried through working-class communities: ghost stories, sayings, warnings, rituals, jokes, family myths, local legends, rumours, grief, humour and memory.
COMMON LORE begins from the belief that working-class people are not just the subjects of folklore. We are folklorists, artists, researchers, memory-keepers and cultural workers in our own right.
who is this for?
COMMON LORE is for people who self-identify as working-class, from low-income backgrounds, council estate backgrounds, care-experienced backgrounds, first-generation university backgrounds, precarious work backgrounds, or communities historically excluded from arts, heritage, academic and publishing spaces.
You do not need a degree, publication history, arts CV or formal folklore background to be part of this.