Joy Sather-Wagstaff - Sociology and Anthropology (NDSU)

Joy Sather-Wagstaff, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Collaborative for Applied and Critical Heritage Engagement (CACHE), Co-coordinator with Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels

Ph.D. Anthropology (2007), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

B.A. Anthropology & B.S. Gender Studies (2000), University of Utah

Research and teaching specializations: Tourism, museums, global and local heritage/historical sites; disaster, violence and genocide studies; anthropology of space and place; affect, memory, and historicity; critical heritage studies; consumption and commodification; visual anthropology; sociolinguistics and anthroposemiotics; contemporary visual and material culture; vernacular photography and souvenirs; cultures of collecting; landscape and built environment history; death and mourning; social justice movements; teaching with technology; social media and public interest anthropology; Geographical regions of specialization: United States, Caribbean, South and Central America.

Selected publications:

2013 With co-author: Rebekah Sobel, From Memory to Action: Multisited Visitor Action at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Museums and Social Issues 7(2):293-305.

2011 Heritage that Hurts: Tourists in the Memoryscapes of September 11. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.

2011 Beyond Content: Thematic, Discourse-centred Qualitative Methods for Analysing Visual Data. In An Introduction to Visual Research Methods in Tourism. Tijana Rakić and Donna Chambers, eds. pp. 169-186. London/New York: Routledge.

2009. Folk Epigraphy as Intangible Heritage at the World Trade Center, Oklahoma City and Beyond. In Intangible Heritage Embodied, D. Fairchild Ruggles and Helaine Silverman, eds. pp. 169-184. New York: Springer.

2008. Picturing Experience: A Tourist-centred Perspective on Commemorative Historical Sites. Tourist Studies 8(1):77-103.

Recent paper presentations:

2013 “Appropriated Heritage in Popular Cultures of Memorialization: The Rhetoric of Nature.” Encounters with Popular Pasts: Meanings and Myths at the Interface of Heritage and Popular Culture workshop, Collaborative for Cultural Heritage Management and Policy (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US), Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage and Institute for Advanced Studies (University of Birmingham, UK), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL

2012 "Making (Poly)Sense of Affect and Heritage: Re-siting Body, Mind, Fieldwork, and Methods." Session: Heritage and the Politics of Affect. Association for Critical Heritage Studies: Gothenburg, Sweden

2011 “Embodiment, Experience, Exploration: A Polysensual Approach to Historicity.” Invited Annual Public History Lecture, Current Issues in Museums, Heritage, and Public Cultural Work series. Department of History, Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence (CEREV), Department of Art History, and the Montreal Institute of Genocide & Human Rights Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, QC.

2011 "Embodied Experience and Prosthetic Memory-making in Memorial Museums." Co-authored with Rebekah Sobel. Session: Embodied Encounters with Legacies of Violence: Movement, Memory, Tourism (session co-organizer with Taku Suzuki). Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association: Montreal, QC Canada.

2010 “Memorial Museums for a ‘Heritage that Hurts’ and Visitor Conformity, Complication, and Resistance: Implications for Critical Heritage Studies” Invited presenter, session: Critical Heritage Studies: Knowledge, Identity, Power, Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association: New Orleans, LA.

Applied research opportunities for undergraduates:

Dr. Sather-Wagstaff is a faculty mentor for the McNair Scholars Program.

North Dakota State University

Sociology and Anthropology

Joy Sather-Wagstaff, Ph.D.

Courses Taught

Sociology and Anthropology navigation