An Interview with Keynote Presenter Professor Helen Chatterjee

Professor Helen Chatterjee will be delivering the closing keynote address, “Museums, Health, and Well-being: The Bio-psychosocial Impact of Museum Participation,” at the Alberta Museums Association 2019 Conference. In advance of the conference, Prof. Chatterjee spoke with Ann Ramsden, Executive Director of the Arts and Heritage Foundation of  St. Albert, for an interview.


You are a professor of Biology specializing in genetics, evolution, and environment. With this academic background, how did you become interested in museological research?

I trained as a zoologist with a PhD in primatology, and my zoology research has always involved using zoology museum collections to look at morphological adaptation, evolution, and conservation of endangered species. During my PhD, I ‘inherited’ University College London’s Grant Museum of Zoology. Initially, I began as a TA, teaching using the collections, but when the Curator retired, I took on that role. I ran the Museum for ten years before becoming Director, then Deputy Director of UCL Museums for five further years. I still use the museum today for teaching and research.

During my time at the Grant Museum, I began researching object-based learning and the value of museums to health and well-being. Ten years ago, I was awarded the first ever UK research grant to explore the role of touch and object handling in relation to well-being and health, and my work has expanded from there.

A Preconference Conversation with Keynote Presenter Dr. Carol Ryff and Moderator Dick Averns

Dr. Carol D. Ryff will be delivering the opening keynote address, “Bridging the Museum Experience to Well-being and Health,” at the Alberta Museums Association 2019 Conference. In advance of the conference, Dr. Ryff sat down with Dick Averns, artist and engagement coordinator with CARFAC Alberta, for an interview. 


Averns: Thanks for sharing some insight into your work, Carol, on the Conference theme, As a Whole: Well-being, Health, and Museums. So, how does your work and research promote health and well-being, and how do you see museums as relevant?

Ryff: For the last thirty years, my research has addressed three main questions: What is human well-being? How can we measure it? And how does it matter for health? My past research has not explicitly linked museum experiences to health and well-being, although I am an advocate for work in that direction. I’m especially interested in how partaking of museums might impact people’s sense that their lives have meaning, purpose, and direction, as well as their sense that they are experiencing personal growth over time.

Opening and Closing Plenary Presenter Preview with Joe Vipond

Joe Vipond has worked as an emergency physician in Calgary for eighteen years. In 2012, he became one of the key organizers for the successful Alberta Coal Phase Out campaign and the subsequent Canadian Coal Phase Out campaign. He currently is involved with The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), the Alberta Wilderness Association, and the CAPE-Alberta Committee, a regional group of physicians, nurses, and other health professionals who successfully negotiated the creation of Alberta Health Services first Office of Sustainability. When not doctoring or trying to change the world, he does his best to be a good husband and dad to his two amazing children, Sadie and Willa.

Please provide a brief overview of your role and the work that your organization does. How do you see your work connecting to the museum world?

Museums have two important connections to climate. First, they are institutions of communication. Through museums we learn. And we desperately need to learn more about the science of climate. It has become the undiscussable topic...who really wants to talk about the possible end of the world, and our role in it? But we desperately need to talk about it. Because by ignoring the subject, we also make it impossible to fix it. 

Opening and Closing Plenary Presenter Preview with Cathy Molloy

Cathy Molloy is the Director of Markham Museum. She was born in Toronto and grew up in the Rouge Valley, specifically on the edge of one of its wonderful ravines. Before returning to Markham Museum and becoming its Director in 2008, Cathy worked as a Curator at both the Oshawa Museum and Markham Museum, and was instrumental in raising funds to build the Aurora Cultural Centre. Cathy’s interest in environmental issues goes back to her teen years where she participated in the Boyd Conservation Archaeological Summer Field School, which was the start of a life-long desire to better understand how humans interact with the natural world. 

Please provide a brief overview of your role at Markham Museum and the work that your organization does.

The Vision of Markham Museum is to "inspire a life-long curiosity, pride in, and care for, the people, tangible heritage, places, lands and waterways of the City of Markham: past, present and future.” Our mission is to “examine Markham by engaging technologies developed and used by all human cultures to live in the natural world; agriculture and food; material culture; engineering and environmental. We will engage science, industry, history and the arts to understand how Markham became what it is today and what its possible futures could be”.

Museums and Environment

One of the questions that repeatedly comes up when museums are asked to think about how they can engage with environmental issues is “our museum is about [insert subject here] - how do we engage in discussions around the environment when it does not apply to us?” When museum professionals look at their institutions through a different lens, however, it becomes obvious that there are many connections to the environment. By highlighting these connections, museums can be agents of social change by engaging their communities in timely discussions around this vitally important topic.

Still not sure how your museum might fit? Consider the following broad examples:

The Lougheed House's Beltline AlTOURnative Project

The Lougheed House received the 2017 Leadership Award for Engagement for the Beltline AlTOURnative Project. In this post, the project team shares their story of engaging Calgary's Beltline community in a new and different way. 

The Lougheed House is known for traditional Victorian grandeur, and as a sandstone sentinel of the prairie. The House offers interpretive tours that contextualize its historical and current place in the growing city of Calgary throughout its’ 125 years of history. However, there are many additional stories that could be wound through and around this local landmark; stories that are challenging yet necessary to tell.  

A Welcome from The Alberta Legislature

The Alberta Legislature is not a conventional museum. At first glance, its only artifacts seem to be a building and portraiture of long-forgotten lawmakers who maintain an air of solemnity (despite visiting schoolchildren making fun of Speaker Wilson’s prodigious mustache).

It is much more than that, however.

Our mandate is broad: to educate the public about the functions of government, to share the province’s political and social history, and to let Albertans know that the handsome Beaux-Arts building in the river valley isn’t just a landmark or an office for politicians. It belongs to the people of Alberta.