We were lucky to catch up with Elise Park recently and have shared our conversation below.

Elise, appreciate you joining us today. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you in your professional career?

I love this question, but I have a hard time answering it because there are just too many important lessons I learned at previous jobs. Honestly, so many of the skills, strategies, systems, or approaches that I use in my work today came from completely unrelated jobs that I did in the past.

Bartending helped me understand inventory systems, managing restaurants gave me experience writing and managing budgets, events planning helped me practice project management strategies, and working for small nonprofits helped me realize the importance of attracting and retaining quality collaborators and coworkers. I learned to manage customer experiences long before I learned the responsibilities of a museum curator. Wearing the “HR” hat for other companies made me a better listener and interviewer. Even when I worked jobs for a season, there were lessons in each opportunity that I have carried over into my current position. In some ways it’s made for a chaotic resume, but over the years as I’ve honed in on more specialized skillsets, I’ve been more and more grateful to have such diverse professional experiences as a foundation to build on and grow from. I’m not sure I could pick just one important lesson from one of those roles – they were all super important in shaping my professional development, whether I knew it or not at the time.

Elise, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

In recent years I’ve been employed in the museum industry, but I think a lot of people are surprised to learn that I didn’t consider working in museums until I was already a year into graduate school! A lot of people also assume that I’m an historian since I work in a museum, which isn’t the case! I did minor in sociology and history in college (I majored in political science), but I identify more as a cultural anthropologist than a historian because I earned my masters degree from Rutgers Department of Anthropology and Sociology.

When I tell people I’m a cultural anthropologist, their response is often something like “well, what do you consider ‘culture’?” Culture is often so intangible, so obvious, or so unspoken that we tend to take it for granted until something like Saint Patricks Day or Mardi Gras come around, but our cultural identities really shape so much of our world and our daily realities! You could call them “shared identities” – cowboys, cheerleaders, millennials, Mormons, foodies, gamers – you name it, we all have at least one cultural group we identify with, and that collective identity can be really powerful. Our cultural identities influence our daily lives in ways we don’t often think about – everything from how we celebrate birthdays to what coffee shop we frequent to how we vote. And that’s really what I’ve always been interested in studying and working with – popular cultures, counter cultures, informal community groups – you know, the sort of things that make us feel like we “belong” and how those dynamics can make the world a better place or lead us into serious conflicts.

So in grad school, I focused on studying some of the most intractable conflicts in the world – those involving religious beliefs or similarly deeply-engrained, multigenerational cultural systems. I was fortunate enough to be mentored in conflict justification doctrines by James Turner Johnson, distinguished professor (now emeritus) of Religion and Political Science and R. Brian Ferguson, expert in pre-modern warfare, cooperative systems, and human evolution. As I was studying all the ways our cultural identities can influence our willingness to engage in present or future conflicts, I became hugely impacted by Dr. Isaias Rojas-Perez’s work on how our cultural identities also shape the ways we remember the past. That was a big “a ha!” moment for me – realizing that our cultural identities influence our relationships with the past as well as the present. At the same time, I was working as an ethnographic researcher for the American Museum of Natural History, and the two concepts just blended together in my mind – museums and remembering.

At that point, I became not just interested in museum work but passionate about the role that museums and public institutions play in connecting us to the past, helping us remember our collective histories, and how those memories shape our current cultural identities and vice versa. The concept of memorialization – statues, cemeteries, plaques, etc. – has become a hot topic in some places as effigies to Columbus or Confederates have been challenged or removed in recent years, but there are so many other opportunities for us to more effectively engage with the past, and doing so can actually help us more effectively shape our collective future! I think many museums are doing this work, but other public institutions, art installations, etc. are also helping communities shape our relationships to the past. So although I’m not a historian, I do think that the museums can be instrumental in helping our communities and cultural groups remember and connect with our collective histories and I’m honored to have the opportunity to engage with the processes of cultural identity formation and memorialization in my current role.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I think more than anything what’s guided me has been, for better or worse, the continual pursuit of what interests me rather than what is “employable” or “marketable”. I never really pursued a specific job title or studied something because I knew there was a job doing it. I never really knew where my path was taking me, but I’m glad that I chose to follow my interests and I’ve been fortunate enough to have opportunities to engage with my interests and my community in my professional life. It’s taken a lot of blind faith, and often some long explanations about my colorful resume, but I don’t regret following my interests.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I think one of the greatest paradoxes that I’ve been struggling with lately is the idea of being an “expert” that’s still learning. What I’ve had to “unlearn” is the idea that experts know everything about a subject – I think in reality most experts became experts because they have more questions than answers and are continually learning! For me, it’s been hard to feel confident about what I know while also recognizing how much I still have to learn.

In general I think we tend to expect leaders to have all the answers, and it’s easy for those individual to feel pressured to have a polished response or solution to every question. So I’ve been working on letting go of unreasonable expectations I’ve put on myself and I’ve been thinking often about the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s reframing of learning systems. In essence he challenged the idea that teachers hold knowledge while students are empty vessels. Instead he suggested that the process of learning is actually the mutual exchange of ideas and information – that we are all simultaneously teachers and students. So I’ve been unlearning the idea of “expertise” as a fixed state and tried to embrace the belief that experts are “active learners”.

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