Charles L. Briggs attempts to bring together his past research and methodologies into conversation with the disciplines of folkloristics, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and other fields, arguing that much of their theoretical frameworks have as much input from fieldwork as from academia. While many disciplines have credited their interviewees as being crucial to understanding their research, Briggs takes this a step further and also credits his mentors in the field for influencing theory and frameworks.The introduction contextualizes Brigg's beginnings and how his childhood and early career helped form his techniques and influence his research. His “principles for unlearning” offer advice on how to approach fieldwork, starting with: “Don't limit yourself to safe, predictable situations that are under (your) control” (p. 44). Although this is compelling advice from a cisgendered white-male perspective, it may not apply to all researchers, especially those who experience unsafe situations in their everyday life. His other principles for unlearning center around embracing discomfort in ethnographic situations and exploring why you are uncomfortable. While encouraging ethnographers to feel unsettled as a method for getting them out of their own headspace has been key to ethnography, this advice works only for certain ethnographers. The discipline certainly should not aim to marginalize those ethnographers who feel uncomfortable in everyday life, put students in unsafe situations, or imply that good research requires putting oneself in situations that may negatively affect the researcher. Challenging one's worldview should be the goal more than suffering for one's research.The book is divided into three sections: Unlearning Racialized Disciplinary Genealogies; Rethinking Psychoanalysis, Poetics, and Performance; and A New Poetics of Health, Multispecies Relations, and Environments. Chapter 1 concerns eliminating boundary work, especially in the area of theory, but neglects to mention many folklorists who have centered their theory with their participants. Some notable examples include Ann Ferrell, Burley: Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century (University Press of Kentucky, 2013); Anika Wilson, Folklore, Gender, and AIDS in Malawi (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and David Todd Lawrence and Elaine Lawless, When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri (University Press of Mississippi, 2018). While I agree with eliminating boundary work, this seems more relevant to the discipline's past than what I've witnessed in recent years at conferences, especially as some folklorists have embraced decolonizing theory. This chapter usefully reviews the history of folkloristics and helps explain past issues and arguments that may still be relevant. Chapter 2 reflects on models of circulation and ethnopoetics, particularly their importance to our understanding of those we interview. Chapter 3 focuses on the work of Américo Paredes and how folklorists have unjustly overlooked his influence. It also ably introduces the next chapter on decolonizing folklore—a topic key to our field, even if Briggs omits the many efforts made by folklorists to do exactly that. Some notable examples include Shirley Moody-Turner, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation (University Press of Mississippi, 2013); Tim Frandy and B. Marcus Cederström, “Sustainable Power: Decolonising Sustainability through Anishinaabe Birchbark Canoe Building,” in Going Beyond, edited by Marie-Theres Albert (Springer, 2017, 217–30); Anand Prahlad, The Secret Life of a Black Aspie: A Memoir (University of Alaska Press, 2017); August V. Koskimies, and Toivo I. Itkonen, revised by Lea Laitinen, edited and translated by Tim Frandy, Inari Sámi Folklore: Stories from Aanaar (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019); and Shelley Ingram, Willow G. Mullins, and Todd Richardson, Implied Nowhere: Absence in Folklore Studies (University Press of Mississippi, 2019).Part II focuses on psychoanalytic theory and Freud, arguing that folklore has largely overlooked Freud's influence. Given the call to decolonize folkloristics and Freud's extremely Western worldview, this section seems out of place. Part III focuses on health, multispecies relationships, and the environment—more important now than ever as we live through a pandemic and massive environmental changes. Briggs states that folk medicine has been on the periphery of folklore studies, which is certainly true, but hopefully will change after the COVID-19 pandemic.However, I do not agree that “folklorists have focused less on deconstructing dominant perspectives with regard to hegemonic medical epistemologies and practices” (p. 201). David Hufford's work on the Old Hag and sleep paralysis (The Terror That Comes in the Night, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982) directly challenged biomedicine. Diane Goldstein challenged medical perspectives on menopause with “‘When Ovaries Retire’” (Health 4:309–23, 2000) and HIV with Once upon a Virus (University Press of Colorado, 2004). Bonnie Blair O'Connor's Healing Traditions (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995) challenged the notion that folk medicine and biomedicine are incompatible. Erika Brady's Healing Logics (Utah State University Press, 2001) redefined the concept of health and medicine. Robert Glenn Howard critiqued our notions of tradition and authority with “Vernacular Authority” in Tradition in the 21st Century, edited by Trevor J. Blank and Robert Glenn Howard (Utah State University Press, 2013, 72–99). And Tim Tangherlini not only utilized new methodologies, but also deconstructed how legends and conspiracy theories form and can be disentangled with “Toward a Generative Model of Legend” (Humanities 7:1, 2017) and “Bridgegate, Pizzagate, and Storytelling on the Web” (PLoS One, June 16, 2020).Citations aside, Part III is certainly the book's strongest section, and it highlights Briggs’ past work in health and folkloristics, including some of the fascinating research on folklore and animals and posthuman folklore, although it regrettably fails to cite Tok Thompson's Posthuman Folklore (University Press of Mississippi, 2019). Briggs’ research on epidemics remains important to our understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic.Overall, I agree with this book's premise that there are ways folklorists (and all academics) can continue to improve and incorporate antiracism in their scholarship. While some folklorists doing this work are absent in this volume, we still need to do more as a discipline. We need to actively dismantle the colonial ideologies of our discipline, diversify the scholarship we teach, actively recruit and support diverse students, and promote antiracism.Although I agree with this book's overall ideas and concepts, there is a disconnect with what has already happened and continues to happen in folkloristics. This book neglects the work of important scholars and, while other scholars are cited, much of the citations are based on older published work and not their newer work. For example, the most recent citation in chapter 8, which addresses folklore and the media, is from 2016 and ignores some truly excellent work, including the special issue of the Journal of American Folklore on fake news (vol. 131, no. 522, 2018). While I certainly understand the time line of publishing, I note the book's efforts to include the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine rollout, but not more recent relevant scholarship. Moreover, it seems to understate the work of some folklorists by failing to grasp their greater significance in the field and the subtleties of their scholarship.Additionally, the book entirely neglects several important popular works like Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown, 2011), or Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2015). It has not escaped my attention that the majority of the people I've mentioned are women and/or people of color, which seems in direct conflict with the ideas this book proposes. Coupled with citations (without remark) of known predators in our discipline, this raises questions about the volume's progressiveness. Although certainly foundational, Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge seems to miss much of the current research in our field. Additionally, for all its focus on involving “the folk” in our theoretical processes, this volume is full of jargon and is largely inaccessible to those very people.