Since 2016, Estonian Literary Museum has organised yearly autumn schools for graduate students of humanities, focusing every time on a specific subtopic, e.g. in 2016 on dialogues with subcultures and in 2017 on digital humanities. In 2018, the event was titled “Dialogues with children and youth”. These dialogues were inspired by the big school lore collecting campaign “School lore 2018” that took place at the initiative of the Department of Folkloristics (Estonian Literary Museum) in 2017-2018 and resulted in 3,717 filled-in questionnaires containing diverse information about the universe of children. The 2018 autumn school offered papers about young children’s folklore, family humour, school memes, education, youth subcultures, moral panics related to the youth’s behaviour, hybrid forms of children’s Christian and magic beliefs. In 2019, the autumn school was titled “Dialogues with environment”. Discussions related to the environment are increasingly topical in the humanities and the lectures and debates of the autumn school approached the topic of the environment in a broad and interdisciplinary way, looking at respective language use, beliefs, emotions, fears, philosophies and lifestyles but also sound- and technoscapes and urban environment.

In 2020, amidst the Covid-19 crisis, the focus was on the topic “Dialogues with health”. The remaining two events of the current series will be “Dialogues with Magic” (2021) and “Dialogues with the Senses” (2022).

The main aim of this Dialogues-series of autumn schools is to foster communication between various disciplines and between students and researchers, helping to integrate students more into practical research life. One of the ideas of the events is to support cooperation of students and research institutions that are not directly involved in teaching (e.g. museums, archives, institutes). The main target group of the autumn schools are PhD but also MA students in folklore, ethnology, linguistics, semiotics, philosophy, religion, art, further social and communication studies.

The series of the autumn schools is supported by the European Union via European Regional Development Fund (ASTRA project of Estonian Literary Museum, titled EKMDHUM, and CEES).