UCL Email: rose.taylor.14@ucl.ac.uk
Year of start: 2017
Supervisors: Professor Haidy Geismar, Dr Rafael Schacter
Subject: Social Anthropology
Fieldsite: Los Angeles
PhD Research
Contested Spaces: Negotiating Native American Artistic Identity in Los Angeles
My research focuses on contemporary Native American arts producers who use visual practices as a means of communicating their experiences as a Native person today and contributing to reclamation and re-indigenisation of their culture, imageries and spaces. Those who I work with engage in a wide range of visual mediums such as paintings, photography, installations, and performance. I aim to highlight Native perspectives on contemporary art, aesthetics and discourses of representation within the geographic framework of Los Angeles as a Native space and place. I consider how Native artists in this area negotiate notions of identity and artistic agency to reflect contemporary indigeneity in a sprawling and dynamic urban area. Simultaneously I explore the art world of Los Angeles in comparison to other geographic centres of Native art, as well as engaging in museum anthropology and museums as field sites.
Research interests
- Visual culture
- Native American art
- Museum Anthropology
- Anthropology of Art
- Material culture
- Intersection of Social and Environmental Anthropology
- Political and diasporic identities
- Urban ethnography
- Ethnobotany
- History of art
Presentations & Conferences
Conferences
- 2019 - Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, SIMA Symposium: Weaving Relations - What Chumash Baskets in Museums Can Tell us About Identity and Status.
- 2019 - Oxford University, Royal Anthropological Student Conference: Contested Spaces: Negotiating Native American Artistic Identity in Los Angeles.
Publications
- 2019 - Exploding Objects: A Month at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Material World.
Education History
- 2017 – Present: PhD Candidate in Anthropology, University College London (UCL).
- 2014 – 2015: MSc Anthropology, University College London (UCL).
- 2011 – 2014: BA (Hons) Anthropology with History of Art. Oxford Brookes University.