The Fullness of Time: Heartwork to Undiscipline Settler Temporalities

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In this paper we argue that refusing a settler sense of time in favor of locally grounded ones (what we call “undisciplining”) is a form of heart-centered practice. Historical archaeology lends itself to epistemic undisciplining, and continues to grapple with time and what is meant by history. But what does it mean to understand time and chronology building as socially and politically shaped? How do we use time? How are settler time and memory used as tools of dispossession? How do political and cultural collectives counter settler time with their own temporalities, as through embodied and affective time? And how does a consideration of the fullness of time (i.e., many intersecting senses of time) require heartwork, work that is anchored in care, rigorous self-reflexivity, and responsibility? We provide examples from our own work both advocating for community-based temporalities and challenging the legacies of settler institutional and disciplinary timekeeping.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow