Joy Sather-Wagstaff, assistant professor of anthropology, is the author of a chapter for "Intangible Heritage Embodied," a book edited by Helaine Silverman and D. F. Ruggles. The book explores and critiques the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s 2003 convention for protecting intangible heritage. The authors argue for an understanding of intangible heritage as that which is practiced and culturally transmitted through the performing body.
Sather-Wagstaff’s chapter is titled “Folk Epigraphy as Intangible Heritage at the World Trade Center, Oklahoma City and Beyond.” In this chapter she analyzes commemorative graffiti and other message-leaving forms as traditionally transient and temporary embodied memory acts that are now made more durable for use in museums and memorial landscapes through photography, art, digital archiving and architecture.
Sather-Wagstaff also had a journal article, titled "Picturing Experience: A Tourist-centered Perspective on Commemorative Historical Sites," appear in Tourist Studies: An International Journal. This was a special issue of the journal centered on ethnographic methods for tourist and tourism studies. The article discusses the value of ethnographic methods for studying tourist photography in order to analyze and understand tourists’ experiences at memorials to recent disasters and other historical sites from the visual and emotional perspective of tourists themselves.
Sather-Wagstaff is currently engaged in a collaborative research project at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is working with Rebekah Sobel, program evaluator for the museum. Sather-Wagstaff and Sobel are assessing museum patrons' visit and post-visit experiences regarding a new interactive exhibit in the museum and online at www.ushmm.org/genocide/take_action. The installation, "From Memory to Action: Meeting the Challenge of Genocide Today," asks visitors to use the context of the Holocaust and three case studies in Darfur, Rwanda and Bosnia to take action against hate and genocide through a focus on the recent genocide, ongoing conflicts and conflict resolution.