Emma J Walcott-Wilson

University of Tennessee Chattanooga, Social, Cultural, and Justice Studies, Adjunct

Ozarks Technical Community College, Social Science, Adjunct

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Welcome! I am Emma, a cultural and historical geographer with specialties in southern heritage tourism, qualitative research methods, and interpretations of slavery, race and gender at historic sites. Currently I am an adjunct instructor of geography at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, Ozarks Technical Community College, and conducting independent research.

In my undergraduate and MA research, I focused primarily on local place narratives, tour guides, U.S. National Parks, and public memory of slavery and the U.S. Civil War. As a PhD student at the University of Tennessee, I continued to conduct research in the field of cultural geography and tourism, with a particular focus on plantation museums in South Carolina.
Supervisors: Dr. Derek Alderman (advisor), Professor of Geography at UTK
Phone: 4178277493
Address: Springfield, MO, United States

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Papers by Emma J Walcott-Wilson

The African Burial Ground in New York City: memory, spirituality, and space (Book Review)

Social & Cultural Geography

Tour Guides as Place-makers: Emotional Labor, Plantation Aesthetics, and Interpretations of Slavery at Southern House Museums (Dissertation)

Plantation house museums have come under increased scrutiny for obscuring or excluding altogether... more Plantation house museums have come under increased scrutiny for obscuring or excluding altogether histories of enslaved laborers. Plantation sites have by-and-large re-cast the characters of the plantation, transforming spaces of Black labor into spaces of White leisure. However, changing tourist interests/demographics and increased research on representations of slavery have challenged the tradition of Lost Cause ideology as a centerpiece of interpretation at sites of slavery and the effective whitewashing of these formerly majority-Black spaces. Recently there has been a movement to find and implement more-complete interpretations of slavery at historic sites, evidenced by the opening of numerous museums and historic sites that have an interpretive focus on slavery. Tour guides are powerful place-making agents at plantation house museums. The ways tour guides experience place—their physical and emotional labor, development of tours, and engagement with the landscape—contribute to the (re)creation of historical narratives and plantation atmospheres. This dissertation builds on research in cultural geography, critical tourism, and heritage studies that investigate the function and deployment of narrative at plantation house museums and sites of slavery.

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Walcott Wilson CV

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The Empathy Gap: An Ethnography of Volunteer Tour Guides and the Language of Affective Interpretation

International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 2017

Tour guides at historic sites are increasingly recognized by heritage and place studies as import... more Tour guides at historic sites are increasingly recognized by heritage and place studies as important agents of place creation and recreation. Guides at Civil War sites repeatedly preform official and vernacular historical narratives for school groups, military staff-rides, and general visitors. At Wilson's Creek National Battlefield in Southwest Missouri, the interpretive division relies on a reciprocal relationship with dozens of volunteer educators who make it possible to keep the Ray House, a homestead site used as a field hospital during the Battle of Wilson's Creek, open for visitor tours. Using the analysis of surveys, in-depth interviews, and tour observations, this study seeks to illustrate that volunteers act as important conduits for channeling and reinforcing certain cultural heritage identities and promulgating certain national values and popular myths. In this paper I will discuss the politics of attachment and discomfort as volunteer guides create narratives that are often far removed from the objects or stories established by the museum and park management. I will focus on the way guides create the stories designed to make an impression on visitors and why those stories regularly exclude difficult histories of enslavement and violence against women.

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