In September 2019, the CMA Board announced new editors for the section’s journal, Museum Anthropology. Dr. Emily Stokes-Rees is Associate Director of the School of Design and Associate Professor of Museum Studies at Syracuse University. Dr. Phaedra Livingstone is a Professor and Program Coordinator for the Museum and Cultural Management program at Centennial College.
To introduce Dr. Stokes-Rees and Dr. Livingstone to the larger CMA community, Lillia McEnaney (Blog Manager, Communications Committee) conducted short interviews with both co-editors.
This is Part 1 with Dr. Livingstone – stay tuned for the second installment with Dr. Stokes-Rees. Interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Image courtesy of Phaedra Livingstone
Dr. Phaedra Livingstone
Professor & Program Coordinator, Museum & Cultural Management
School of Communications, Media, Arts & Design, Centennial College
Co-Editor, Museum Anthropology
Please describe your current position, background, and any supplemental work that you do.
I am a museologist with extensive international and local experience developing, delivering, and evaluating museum and postsecondary programs and exhibitions. From 2008 through 2015 I was a professor at the University of Oregon, where I directed the museum studies concentration in the (now closed) Arts and Administration graduate program and the university's interdisciplinary Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies, and taught core courses in arts management. Before returning home to Toronto and joining Centennial College, I spent a year as a senior museum consultant on the development of Al Shindagha Museum, a national cultural hub in Dubai, UAE. My teaching experience also includes dozens of workshops for professionals, other postsecondary courses for emerging professionals and public education programs in museums, galleries and heritage sites. I continue to consult, as time allows, and do professional service.
Among my publications are articles in ICOM News (France), Journal of Arts Management, Law & Society, and the Journal of Museum Education (USA), Museological Review (UK), Museum Management and Curatorship (Canada), and Museum Management Today International (Japan). I am currently co-editor (with Emily Stokes-Rees) of the academic journal Museum Anthropology. With V. Gosselin, I edited the book Museums and the Past: Constructing historical consciousness (UBC Press, 2016), which is one of the few titles to offer a survey of museological practice and perspectives in Canada.
I have served on a number of boards, including the International Council of Museums- International Committee on the Training of Professionals (ICOM-ICTOP, 2010-2019), American Alliance of Museums- Museum Studies Network (2014-2016), the Coalition to Advance Learning in Archives, Libraries, & Museums (US, 2015-2016), Heritage Toronto (2004-2008), and the Visitor Studies Association (2001-2003). I also regularly peer-review for scholarly publications and conferences.
Drawing from my broad experience and training in anthropology, museology and education, my applied research and teaching aims to improve museum practice; it explores the subjective and experiential nature of artifact interpretation, the praxis and poetics of public exhibitions, equity and inclusion in museum participation, feminist/standpoint methodology, and the public perception of museums. I was awarded the 2013 Smithsonian Institution Fellowship in Museum Practice for the research project Exhibition Interpretation: Touchstones, Touchscreens and Timeless Tall Tales.
How did you become interested in museum anthropology?
I’ve worked in the field since 1991 and have been split between a practice and academic focus throughout. I did my honours undergraduate degree as a specialist in anthropology at the University of Toronto (effectively, I double majored in sociocultural anthropology and archaeology with a minor in biological anthropology). Increasingly though, over time, it became clear that material culture analysis was missing from my training, and material culture was really what pulled me to anthropology in the first place.
While an undergraduate, the Into the Heart of Africa exhibition and boycott happened at the Royal Ontario Museum. So, there was a lot of discussion surrounding representation and the role of museums – all of the conversations that are so central to museum anthropology now were still being problematized and formulized in Canadian museum discourse at the time. Things were still very raw and being worked out – everybody in the field seemed confused and scared. It was a really fascinating time to be interested in material culture because simultaneously, the University of Toronto was still very structural-functionalist in approach and still hadn’t picked material culture back up.
Because of that void, during my third year, I took an experimental archaeology and comparative ethnography course. For each units’ assignment, we had to go out and do experiments on our own to solve a problem, such as how do you make fire using X method or how do you with make a stone tool using groundstone technology rather than flintknapping? The last unit was a wildcard assignment– we chose our own technology. I chose textile dyeing because I wanted to figure out how resist dyeing (batik) was done. So, I went to what is now the Canadian Textile Museum, got access to their library to do the research, and soon got pulled into doing what became a four-year apprenticeship with the museum. At the time, they were moving into their current collections facility, which allowed me to continue this interest in material culture analysis. Through this informal apprenticeship, I completed a Museum Studies Certificate, and later worked full-time as a field archaeologist. Later on, while working on the archaeological project, I got involved in the museum side of the work, which was my first paid job in museums.
Since then, I’ve worked at a number of different museums around Canada on a freelance basis. I later completed my M.M.St. in Museum Studies, and worked as a museum educator in Toronto museums for a while. While I was working at a large art museum there was a First Nations Northwest Coast mask exhibition on display, the curatorial intent for which was to offer an anti-racist intervention. As an educator on the floor of the exhibition, one day I observed two visitors: the son was really engaged, and the dad said no “we’re not stopping to look at this dirty stuff.” This was, of course, the opposite of what the curator intended. There was already all this great New Museology theory out there, but that didn’t mean that the visitor was getting it.
So, as a result, I did my PhD on learning in non-school settings, where I looked at museum communication and museum learning, which includes staff learning, transformative learning, and issues-based exhibitions.
If no one is getting what you’re saying, it’s a “so-what” exercise. That is a different sort of museum anthropology that isn’t really a larger conversation in anthropology right now – it’s more in visitor studies, sociology, and psychology.
Today, my primary interest is in interpretation and representation. Both my practical work and my research have focused on social representation through exhibitions, collections, visitors, and staff.
Why did you want to become an editor of Museum Anthropology?
I want to engage in these dialogues, both between theory and practice, and visitor and curator. Critique is one thing, but you have to do it, and I think I’m in a good position to do it.
I also have a sentimental attachment to the journal – as a sophomore in college, I joined AAA and Museum Anthropology was the first journal I subscribed to.
I also have experience during editorial work, even stretching back to high school, where I was an editor on the paper, but more recently, I co-edited book for UBC Press (2016), Museums and the Past: Constructing historical consciousness. So, I’ve not only done editorial work and reviewing for scholarly journals, I’ve been a co-editor before and I enjoy comradery and intellectual exercise.
The final reason is that I wanted to work with Emily [Stokes-Rees]. We have a complimentary approach and I’m really excited!
What do you think is the most interesting or compelling thing about the field of museum anthropology as a whole?
In a way, it’s the same reason that I am interested in anthropology as a whole – this excitement about learning about other people, places, and times. It’s almost like science fiction, but its real – it’s better because it is real.
It is exciting in and of itself, and also inspiring in that people have always been brilliant problem solvers. They’ve solved problems that come up time and again. The human experience is timeless in many ways, and there’s so much to be learned from the knowledge that is to be interpreted from collections. It can, of course, be widely misinterpreted as well, but that’s where the inspiration is. It’s not just about understanding history, it is about being inspired by that creative genius. We’re very concerned with authenticity and appropriate interpretation, but how do we deal with this?
With the 180 degree turn that museums have done in the past twenty-five years and the curator’s role being rewritten, museums no longer have that singular authoritative voice anymore. Now, there’s an implicit understanding in most museum contexts that you can try to control the visitor’s understanding, but honestly, its jello. Your control of any narrative will melt and slip away quickly – you can’t control it. People come in with their own prior experiences, and they come up with their own brilliant interpretations, which may coincide with the dominant narrative or it may be completely different. Visitors may write a song based on a painting they saw, and that is an incredibly useful use of collections as well.
We have the role to be scholarly interpreters of material culture, but we also are there to share the human experience.