Activist Archaeology and Participatory Action Research (PAR): Praxis in Action

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology, Activism, and Protest", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This paper focuses on the ways that archaeological praxis shifts when we embrace the political nature of all archaeology. Participatory Action Research (PAR) provides a method for archaeologists to work as both archaeologists and activists with communities, connecting the past to current injustices. This better allows their work to be translational by incorporating communities’ needs and desires into their research thereby providing useful interventions for affected communities to use for activist purposes. With more engaged methodologies like PAR, archaeologists can also challenge scholarly authority on what constitutes archaeological practice and method. Archaeologists can utilize non-traditional strategies and use traditional archaeological methods in untraditional ways. This can even include archaeological research that does not involve excavation. This paper will highlight several projects from Brooklyn, New York that are redefining archaeology as a way to explore the who, what, and how of activist archaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Archaeology, Activism, and Protest

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow