Challenges on the Road from 9th Avenue to Professional Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While the recent uptick in the amount and frequency of contemporarily, socially relevant sessions and symposia held at SAA annual meetings can certainly be said to be commendable—truly, a much-needed and beneficial pursuit/meta-analysis—I think that a significant intersectional aspect that often gets overlooked when archaeologists engage in these sorts of discussions, regarding the structural barriers that exist to persons from historically disadvantaged backgrounds being able to go on to obtain success in the archaeological field, is the role that having an inner city upbringing can play in shaping a scholar’s experiences on the road to becoming a practicing archaeologist, and thereafter. Originating from South Central Los Angeles, and only being a second-year graduate student at the University of Arizona, this paper seeks to anecdotally draw from some of the numerous challenges that I have faced as a young Black man from the inner city to highlight some of the common struggles that persons from similar backgrounds and communities have to face in order to find success and make places for themselves in a field that can often make such persons feel the furthest away from social context(s) that they can most relate to.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40395.0