Flexibility, Resilience, and Universal Design: Learning from the Experiences of Disabled Archaeologists

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Disability Wisdom for the Covid-19 Pandemic" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Scholar-activists have been critiquing equity issues around gender, race, sexuality, and socioeconomic inequality for the past several decades. With few exceptions, however, this literature rarely addresses disability and accessibility issues. In this paper, I explore the experiences of academic archaeologists with disabilities, showing how experiences of structural ableism have shaped their career trajectories. I present analysis of approximately fifteen in-depth interviews conducted with a diverse sample of disabled archaeologists in 2017 and 2020. Using their stories, I demonstrate that archaeologists can learn important lessons about flexibility and resilience from our disabled colleagues, which are especially timely as our society and discipline are disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. By building accessible, inclusive, flexible courses, research projects, workplaces, and professional organizations, we can contribute to creating a discipline of archaeology that is truly welcoming to all.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021   •
• Disability Wisdom for the Covid-19 Pandemic

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology