I’m Mairi McFadyen, an ethnologist, researcher and creative practitioner working at the intersections of culture, ecology and place.

My work is grounded in more than fifteen years of research and practice in Scottish cultural traditions. I have a PhD in Ethnology & Ethnomusicology and an MSc by Research in Scottish Studies from the University of Edinburgh, where my research focused on oral tradition, song, memory and place. I have worked extensively with Scotland’s oral heritage collections, including through Tobar an Dualchais | Kist o Riches, and with living traditions through work with Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland (TRACS), alongside collaborations with universities, cultural organisations and communities across Scotland. My particular areas of experience include oral history, traditional music and song, placenames, archival research, cultural mapping and participatory research.

More recently, my work has focused on the cultural dimensions of ecological restoration. My approach draws on ethnology and human ecology, bringing cultural research into conversation with ecological restoration, community practice and questions of land, knowledge and agency. I work through research, facilitation, writing, mapping and participatory creative practice, often bringing different kinds of knowledge and experience into conversation with one another.

As Human Ecology Researcher-in-Residence with the Findhorn Watershed Initiative, I explored the watershed through placenames, music, song, story and local knowledge — asking what these fragments of cultural memory might reveal about people’s relationships with the river and its wider watershed, and how bringing them back into living practice might help foster new relationships of attention, connection and care. This work has developed through policy research on intangible cultural heritage, traditional ecological knowledge and nature recovery; a Creative Scotland-supported project in the community-owned Abriachan Forest; and as an invited speaker at The Big Picture conference 2026, Scotland’s Rewilding event.

I describe my practice as cultural darning and mending: finding threads of cultural memory and bringing them back into living practice.This means working with songs, stories, placenames, oral histories, archives and traditional knowledge, but also with contemporary communities, creative practice and the changing life of places. I’m interested in what can be carried forward, reworked and remade — and in how this might help nurture relationships of attention, responsibility, reciprocity and care.