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Dr. Fiona P. McDonald pushes visual anthropology beyond mere images

Assistant Professor models collaboration throughout her research

May 15, 2023

THE ITCHY WARMTH OF A WOOLLEN BLANKET. Birds peeping beside a trickling creek. For Dr. Fiona P. McDonald, these sensory experiences—touch, sight and sound—are important sites for her research in cultural anthropology.

Dr. McDonald, an Assistant Professor in Community, Culture and Global Studies at UBC Okanagan, followed woollen blankets on her journey to becoming a visual anthropologist. She first saw the Hudson’s Bay Company point blanket on a glass negative in the archives. Unfamiliar with these blankets, Dr. McDonald examined archives around the world and has since spent more than a decade looking at the many spaces beyond the archive where the physical woollen blankets have been moved from art galleries to museums, from sacred ceremonies to craft markets.

“This is a deeply problematic commodity that has caused intense debate and distrust,” says Dr. McDonald. “The Hudson’s Bay blankets were originally made by the Weavers of Witney in England, but the blankets became trade commodities in colonial settler spaces.”

When she traced similar woollen blankets to Aotearoa (New Zealand), she learned how Māori weavers used the red wool from blankets to replace the feathers of the now-endangered kākāpō birds that were originally used for sacred cloaks. When she was in southeast Alaska, collaborating with the Sealaska Heritage Institute, she witnessed how woollen blankets have become traditional robes in Tlingit regalia.

In her current book project, Dr. McDonald examines how Indigenous artists and makers in Canada, the United States, and New Zealand have transformed woollen blankets into anti-colonial art, craft and clan property.

Dr. McDonald’s interest in material culture extends beyond textiles to the materiality of sound and other senses. She is Director of the Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab (CE² Lab) at UBCO, a critical research lab unparalleled in Canada for sensory ethnography. The CE² Lab is a site of collaboration between Dr. McDonald, community partners and other groups on campus.

For instance, one lab project involves sensory storytelling by creating digital tools that use art for immersive informal science learning. In a pilot project in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Dr. McDonald and her collaborator Dr. Benjamin Day Smith worked with elementary students to record sounds of water in their everyday lives. The project taught students to edit the audio they collected, and with specialized software that Dr. McDonald and Dr. Smith developed, the students created immersive sound environments.

This work is part of Dr. McDonald’s larger efforts around addressing the Anthropocene in her research; she also co-published An Anthropocene Primer, a born-digital, open access publication that connects people to scholarly works, activities and knowledge across disciplines to how we think, live and understand climate justice.

Dr. McDonald’s distinctive research bridges the space between arts-based ethnography and research-creation. She was a founding member of the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective, a curatorial team that creates public exhibitions alongside the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings in Canada and the United States. Thanks to their collective work, the AAA acknowledges the curation of exhibitions as an important scholarly contribution.

“My priority is learning through collaboration and making room for dynamic ways of thinking with our senses, and not just about them.”

“I’m not only an anthropologist,” says Dr. McDonald. “I’m a curator and I also link it to my own publishing as an academic and my role as editor.”

Since joining UBCO, Dr. McDonald has acted as co-editor-in-chief at the Visual Anthropology Review—the flagship journal of her field. In this role, she completed a major redesign of the journal with Dr. Stephanie Sadre-Orafai at the University of Cincinnati to better represent visual research in print. Dr. McDonald is also the editor for the Institute for Community Engaged Research (ICER) Press at UBCO. ICER Press will launch in 2023, and Dr. McDonald is currently working with Dr. Jeannette Armstrong to create a new series for Nsyilxcn language works.

Dr. McDonald feels honoured to work with knowledge keepers through her research and editorial work. And this sentiment carries forward to the respect she has to live and work on unceded ancestral Syilx territory. Not only is she thrilled to bring her global experience to UBCO’s diverse campus, but the Okanagan’s access to nature is also a huge draw, allowing Dr. McDonald to snowshoe in the winter and swim in the summer. She incorporates nature into her research and teaching as well, often bringing her students to Quail Flume Trail near campus for sensory walking experiments known as Anthropocenoscapes.

As an early-career researcher, Dr. McDonald’s priority is “learning through collaboration and making room for dynamic ways of thinking with our senses and not just about them.

“I model collaboration with the intention of creating a space for junior colleagues and graduate students to see and, more importantly, experience it as often as possible.”