Summary
Undisciplined is a KUAF podcast collaboration with the African and African American Studies Program at the University of Arkansas. In this hour-long conversation, hosts Dr. Caree Banton and Dr. Karynecia Conner trace Stevens’ path from an early Roman-port excavation in Italy — where a mosaic of North African stones made African creative production visible across two millennia — to dissertation fieldwork in Liberia and Nigeria, and to the immersive curatorial methods he has been building at Northwestern.
The heart of the episode is a method: photogrammetry, 3D digitization, and virtual reality used to return interpretive authority over diaspora collections to source communities. Stevens explains how he documents Liberian objects held in U.S. museums, places them into a virtual environment where visitors can handle, scale, and annotate them, and then travels to the villages and regions those objects came from so Liberians can record their testimony and feed that content back to the National Museum of Liberia. A parallel effort with Prof. Akin Ogundiran is assembling the same infrastructure for Nigerian material culture through the Material History Lab’s 3D database.
The conversation also moves through contested terrain around repatriation — why “every object should go back” is not the whole story, how the Bamoun Kingdom has asked the Field Museum for more loans as a way to reach its diasporic community, and why the museum value proposition needs to pivot from distance to accessibility. Later stretches touch on the emotional labor of community-based participatory research, what it means to inherit an extractive discipline, and why oral history methods matter to archaeology’s future.