PROFESSIONAL - MUSEUM CURATION | RESEARCH
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AMERICAS CURATOR AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Regional focus on North America
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EMKP PROJECT CURATOR AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM
EMKP is a re-granting programme that supports the documentation of material knowledge systems that are under threat and in danger of disappearing. It also provides free access by stewarding that knowledge in an open access digital repository dedicated to its preservation. I was responsible for several aspects of the programme including grantee management (communications and reports, anthropological oversight, contracts and budget), museum and collections engagement, research, and managing EMKP volunteers.
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RESEARCHER AT ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW
From 2019-2022 I worked at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. I held three project positions working with the art, illustrations and economic botany collections and was involved in the Decolonising Kew working group.
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My most recent role at Kew was as a Research Assistant and Digitiser within Kew’s Useful Plants and Fungi of Colombia project, an international project with the Humboldt Institute in Colombia.
The UPFC project aims to understand Colombia’s useful plants and fungi to improve people’s livelihoods, reducing inequality and gender gap by boosting its bioeconomy through the sustainable use of its biodiversity.
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https://www.kew.org/science/our-science/projects/useful-plants-and-fungi-colombia
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Orchidaceae Cattleya Rex. Kew Gardens, LAA.
CONFERENCES AND PUBLICATIONS​
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Forthcoming journal article - A Cross Institutional Engagement with Chumash Basketry.
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Forthcoming journal article - Human uses of the Espeletia genus in Colombia and Venezuela. Co-authored with Dr. Mauricio Diazgranados, RBG, Kew.
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2023 - Review of Empowering Art: Indigenous Creativity and Activism from North America's Northwest Coast exhibition. Museum Worlds Journal.11(1):264-268.
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2023 - Carved in Stone. British Museum Magazine.
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2024 - Weaving Relations: Community Collaboration and Cross-Institutional Engagement with Chumash Basketry. The Society for the History of Collecting.
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2022 - Royal Anthropological Institute's London Anthropology Day, careers in Anthropology panel. The British Museum.
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2022 - African Heritage’s Futures: Exhibitions, Collections, and Museums’ New Challenges workshop: Digital heritages: digital repositories and new technologies. UCL Anthropology & Africa Studies Centre Leiden.
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2022 - Endangered Material Knowledge: Collaborative Approaches. MBA'EKUAA: Remixing the Future. Museu da Imagem e do Som, Brazil.
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2021 - The Role of Kew's Archives in Furthering Scientific Knowledge of Orchids of Colombia. Royal Anthropological Institute Anthropology and Conservation Conference.
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2019 – Weaving Relations – What Chumash Baskets in Museums Can Tell us About Identity and Status. Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, SIMA Symposium.
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2019 – Contested Spaces: Negotiating Native American Artistic Identity in Los Angeles. Oxford University, Royal Anthropological Student Conference.
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2019 – Exploding Objects: A Month at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Material World.
EXHIBITIONS​
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UPFC: ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW: To complement the Useful Plants and Fungi of Colombia Project (UPFC) at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, I curated a small exhibition, mounted in the Herbarium, which focused on orchids native to Colombia to showcase the research undertaken in my role using the Economic Botany and Library, Art and Archives collections. The exhibition encompassed botanical specimens, scientific line drawings, stunning botanical watercolours and other illustrations, archival documents and statements from Kew scientists. The exhibition also had two areas of digital engagement, access to the UPFC database and a Google Earth simulation that I created. This meticulously followed the route of botanical 'Orchid hunter' Albert Millican in Colombia between 1887-1891 and showed journal extracts and illustrations as well as images of botanical line drawings and watercolours of orchids encountered at points along his journey. The exhibition also illuminated hidden voices, such as the input of women from the 1800s to present day botanical science.
The exhibition highlighted the role Kew's illustrations and archives play in furthering scientific knowledge of orchids of Colombia and how we can unveil plant uses from historical archives. Importantly, it also showed how we can unveil the uses of historical archives and how we are re-interpreting and changing the relationship between botanic gardens, conservation, archival collections and communities of origin.
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ANTHROPOLOGIST
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My main area of research is in Los Angeles, California, home to the largest demographic of urban Native Americans in the US. My research focuses on contemporary Native American artists who use visual practices as a means of communicating their experiences as a Native person today and contributing to reclamation, revitalisation and re-Indigenisation of their culture and spaces. Those I work with use a wide range of visual mediums such as painting, photography, installation art, and performance including traditional dance, on-screen and theatre work.
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I highlight Native American perspectives on contemporary art, aesthetics and discourses of representation in Los Angeles as a Native space and place. I consider how Native artists in LA negotiate notions of identity and artistic agency to reflect contemporary Indigeneity in a sprawling and dynamic urban area. In doing this, I map a Native artworld of Los Angeles, illustrating the different arenas of display, exhibition and performance in comparison to other artworlds and geographic centres of Native/wider-Indigenous art.
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My research is multi-faceted and as such falls between several anthropological sub-disciplines including, cultural and social anthropology, visual anthropology, anthropology of art and material culture, and museum anthropology, using museums as field sites.
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Learn more about my research -
Contested Spaces: Negotiating Native American Artistic Identity in Los Angeles
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Pamela J. Peters. Photograph. ‘Native Apparition’.
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Indigenous rights in relation to environmental resource extraction:
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For my Masters thesis I researched the Penan, an Indigenous hunter-gatherer community living in the interior of Sarawak rainforest in the Malaysian part of Borneo. I conducted in depth library-based and interview-based research surrounding the deforestation of the rainforest as a result of palm oil plantations, hydro-electric dams and logging. My research shows how the changes to the Penan’s environment as a result of resource extraction affects key aspects of their social structure, including hierarchies and egalitarianism, gender relations and work labour, health, human and Indigenous rights violations. The implications determine that logging, palm oil and hydroelectric dams are disastrous for the Penan and signal the end of self-sufficiency in the forest. The Penan’s social, cultural and traditional ways of life are challenged as a result of reduced access to the forest and its resources, pressure to become Malay, and to discard their traditional customs and beliefs. (This research was conducted between 2014 and 2015 and is thus based on that time-frame and so could now be somewhat outdated.)
UCL Anthropology MSc 2014-2015. The Unwanted Gift. The Effect of Palm Oil Plantations and Subsequent ‘Development’ of the Penan of Sarawak. How have development projects such as deforestation, palm oil plantations, and the building of hydroelectric dams affected the social, cultural, and traditional way of life for the Penan of Sarawak, and the Batek of Peninsular Malaysia?
Women’s empowerment and women’s rights:
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An example of my work in this area is research I conducted for my undergraduate dissertation in which I spent a month at a women’s economic empowerment centre in Ngong, Kenya. This was the Living Positive Kenya Centre and WEEP (Women’s Economic Empowerment Programme). WEEP provides 18-month training cycles for women in the community who are victims of domestic violence and HIV/AIDS. The training includes general social care and health education, vocational skills training and training in micro-finance. Through participant observation at the centre and numerous interviews with the women, staff, community members and local government officials, my research examined the extent to which WEEP and similar programmes help to empower women in such circumstances. (You can read more about this here. This research was conducted between 2013 and 2014 and is thus based on that time-frame and so could now be somewhat outdated.
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XRF analysis on a Northwest Coast mask. Museum Support Center, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
Analysing a Chumash basket. Museum Support Center, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
AUTHOR - 365 Days Past The Traffic Lights
In 2018 I lost my father to cancer less than 2 months after he was diagnosed.
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I was 24 and at the time found very little literature or support aimed specifically at millennial/ twenty-somethings, with most aimed at children, or to people who have lost spouses. After a year of living with my grief, feeling isolated and also battling societal expectations that come with being in your twenties and living in London, I decided to write the book I desperately needed at the time in order to help other people.
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365 Days Past the Traffic Lights is about the first 365 days after losing dad and what it is like to grieve as a young adult. It is part self-help and part memoir. To find out more click here.
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365 Days Past the Traffic Lights was published on the 14th October 2019 – dad’s birthday. So far around 200 copies have been purchased worldwide and I hope have provided much needed support and comfort.
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