Month: April 2019

Anarchist Feminist Posthuman Archaeology – CAA 2019

I was grateful to be invited to the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA 2019) conference in Kraków, Poland this year. I participated in the Our Knowledge is all over the place! roundtable organized by Paul Reilly, Stephen Stead and John Pouncett. We had one slide and five minutes in which to discuss a bespoke “knowledge map” that captured our collective disciplinary knowledge.

I’m still digesting the discussion afterwards and my fellow panelists’ perspectives. I was pretty nervous ahead of time as I had basically made a very personal knowledge map about how I framed my own practice and it felt very revealing. I drew heavily from Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and carla bergman and Nick Montgomery’s Joyful Militancy, which have been profoundly impactful in my current practice. I’ve had the kernels of these ideas for a while (see my graduation commencement speech) but the books have given me some of the language and tools to precisely address and actualize this thinking. Empire. Paranoid Reading. Alternatives, not multivocality.

I was also very happy to hear from my fellow panelists: Paul Reilly, Pricilla Ulguim, Tuna Kalayci, Katherie Cook, Lorna Richardson, Daria Hookk (et al), John Pouncett, In-Hwa Choi and Natalia Botica (et al). We all had very different takes on the concept of knowledge maps and it was illuminating to hear from everyone.

I made a loose script, which I loosely adhered to for my five minutes–if you are interested, find it below.

Continue reading “Anarchist Feminist Posthuman Archaeology – CAA 2019”

Re-loading the Archaeological Canon: Decolonising the Undergraduate Archaeology Curriculum

At York, all lecturers are encouraged to complete teacher training to receive their Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PGCAP). I’ve been teaching in higher ed since 2005, but appreciated the training as it was specific to the UK system. One of our tasks was an original research project on an aspect of teaching that we are interested in. I decided to evaluate the first-year undergraduate Archaeology curriculum for inclusion to better understand how the canon of literature was formed in Archaeology.

What resulted was a small project that falls somewhere between a proper paper and a blog post. I went through and made spreadsheets of all of the assigned reading at York. From the paper:

To address the need to decolonise the curriculum in archaeology, I assessed the reading lists assigned to first-year undergraduates within the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, noting two metrics: 1) Perceived Gender, and 2) Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) (see appendix 1). At times these metrics were difficult to determine. Assigning perceived identities was an uncomfortable exercise, but there was not time within the assessment to email each of the authors individually and ask how they should be identified. Some archaeological reports did not attribute authorship. Additionally, I only recorded data regarding the first three authors; in the case of scientific journal articles, I recorded data regarding the first/corresponding author and the last author, as this is generally the lead investigator of the article and the senior author/supervisor, respectively. After gathering these metrics on spreadsheets I assessed each of the courses independently for their inclusion of diverse voices. Finally, I compared this data to data gathered from an Introduction to Archaeology reading list assigned to first-year undergraduates at the Institute of Archaeology at UCL. By doing this I hoped to gain a more general idea of practice within the field, particularly as UCL is the home institution for the ​Why is My Curriculum White​ movement.

I was hoping to use the Gender Balance Assessment Tool, as it measures both gender balance and the inclusion of BAME (for USA readers, this is UK-ese for Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic) authors. Unfortunately it requires the first name to be listed, which almost never happens in reading lists or bibliographic citation, so I had to pick through the lists to manually code them.

Perhaps predictably, the balance is…not so good. From the paper:

Collectively, the autumn and spring term coursework in Archaeology at York assigned reading by female first authors 22% of the time (87/308) (figure 9) and BAME authors 1.3% of the time (4/308). This compares positively to the UCL Introduction to Archaeology figures (though York is an aggregate and UCL may assign more diverse authors in additional courses) and, given more research into reading lists across the UK, might be viewed as average or even good, considering the founding of the profession.

Yet in research conducted in 2013, academic roles in archaeology are divided more evenly, 46% female and 54% male (Aitchison and Rocks-McQueen 2013). Gender parity was expected across archaeology (incorporating commercial, educational, and other sectors) in 2017-2018 and women were to be the majority of the workforce by 2022 (97) (Aitchison and Rocks-McQueen 2013). Research conducted during the same time period on publication and gender in archaeology in the United States revealed a similar gender division, 47% female and 53% male, but also showed a considerable gap in publication rates (Bardolph 2014). Out of 4,552 articles and reports from 11 peer-reviewed journals published between 1990 and 2013, 71.4% were authored by men as the first author and 28.6% by women (Bardolph 2014). A similar study has not been conducted within the UK. Out of the courses surveyed, only Introduction to Archaeological Science surpasses the 28.6% mark of scholarship authored by women, with 30.4% of the reading by women as first authors.

I’m speaking at one of York Archaeology’s Equality and Diversity meetings about the topic, and all of my colleagues that I’ve discussed it with have been interested and invested in trying to diversify the curriculum. We’re changing up several of our core reading lists this summer as well. If that goes well, I may update the paper and send it out somewhere for publication.

But for now, if you are interested, it’s a short read, hastily written:

PGCAP_Research_Project_Morgan_without_appendices

I’ve removed the appendices as York’s reading lists aren’t public–unlike poor UCL, who get picked on for their transparency. Sorry UCL, I still love y’all.

Archaeology, Westworld, and Parasocial Relationships

Parasocial relationships are one-sided relationships that people form with other people (or animals, or things) who are unaware of the other’s existence. It was coined by psychologists Horton and Wohl in 1956 to describe “intimacy at a distance”–the emotions and investment that members of an audience feel in mediated encounters with actors, particularly on TV. I began thinking about parasocial relationships with people in the past; could our interpretive media create such a strong response as to evoke this sense of intimacy? Would a truly engaged public look like fan culture?

Let’s play this out a little bit. Would a true marker of the impact (ugh, I’m beginning to hate that word) of our research be if someone wrote fanfiction about the site, artifact, human remains featured? Should we be applying for funding to host an Archaeo-con, where people cosplay as their favorite beaker person? Or are archaeologists themselves the actual fans, forming parasocial relationships with their particular time period, region, material focus? Are we the ones writing fanfiction about the past? And if so, isn’t that freeing?

Yet a parasocial relationship implies that there is a barrier between the fan and the object of adoration. In archaeology that barrier would be time depth, our focus fuzzy from our various interpretive lenses. But I wonder if parasocial relationships have changed with digital media–harassing your favorite actor is just a tweet away. I’ve previously argued that archaeological interpretation and mediation creates an interstitial space, being “telepresent“–not in the past, fully, but also not quite fully in the present. This can be with any media, but I find it can be particularly affective with digital interpretations. Arguably, the feeling of telepresence and accessibility to the past through an interstitial space might be ascribed to a changing media metaphor–instead of TV we have VR.

In 2018, HBO promoted the second season of Westworld with the Westworld Experience. Westworld plays with tropes of human/android/cyborg experience and so it was fitting that for the Westworld Experience, they hired actors to play androids programmed to think they were humans. And other humans came to interact with the actors and treated them as…less than human. But the experience the Westworld Experience actors had themselves as fully immersed within this world recalled the experience of living history practitioners as described by Handler and Saxton in their article on Dyssimulation. Perhaps the past feels more authentic because there is a more coherent narrative (in retrospect) than our mundane, disjointed lives exhibit. A story feels more true.

So, as archaeological/heritage interpreters, do we aim for a more coherent story that feels true, to fully immerse other people, to omit breaks of presence, or do we dive straight into the dissonance and make interpretations that highlight the disjunctures in interpretation, but may be ultimately self-serving? Are the parasocial relationships we form with those cunningly inaccessible people in the past more compelling because they don’t have the temerity to talk back? …yet?

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