Wait Five Minutes: Weatherlore in the Twenty-first Century (edited collection)

“Don’t like the weather here? Wait five minutes, it’ll change.”

The weather governs our lives. It fills the gaps in conversations, determines our dress and influences our architecture, and is the one app on everyone’s smartphone. No matter how much our lives may have moved indoors, no matter how much we may rely on technology, we still watch the weather. We still engage in weatherlore. Historically, weatherlore as a genre tended to include folk predictions and sayings about the weather, and perhaps even charms to change it. Such folk sayings and beliefs can be still observed in daily interactions, despite our living in a less agrarian society. However, as climate change has begun to reshape the world, we believe that immediate attention should be paid to documenting the folklore of weather and climate.

Weatherlore, while considered a traditional genre within folklore studies, has not received as much scholarly attention as one would assume. We believe that this new volume will be one of the first edited collections to focus exclusively on weatherlore, including the folklore of weather in relation to climate change. To that end, the volume seeks to cover a wide range of topics.
We begin with a rather broad assertion: that folklore about the weather is important on both a macro and a micro level.
It helps us understand and shape global political conversations about climate change and biopolitics at the same time as it influences individual, group, and regional lives and identities. We use weather, and thus its folklore, to make meaning of ourselves, our groups, and, quite literally, our world.

We thus welcome chapters devoted to any aspect of weatherlore, including:

• Popular understandings of weather and climate change
• Weatherlore as a way to track climate change
• Ethnography of current climate movements
• Online discourse about weather, climate, and natural disasters
• Weather-centric online communities
• Weather ritual and belief
• Weather narratives
• Weather, climate, and social justice
• Weather, climate, and the body
• Interactions between weather and folklore in literature, film, or other media
• The role of weather and its lore in the construction of individual and group identities (eg., racial, regional, religious, economic)

Editors: Willow G. Mullins and Shelley Ingram

Please submit complete chapter drafts of 5000-7000 words to singram@louisiana.edu and wmullins@wustl.edu by January 15, 2020. If you have questions or would like to propose a topic, please email.