Definitional Confusion: The Many Meanings of Community-Engagement in Urban Spaces

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Community-engagement is an obligatory element for many practitioners intent on fostering a 21st century, ethical archaeology. However, community-engagement as a term and a practice remains ill-defined, with as many experiences with and constraints on as there are projects. In large part, this is due to the specific issues and situations engendered by urban realities that necessarily involve a myriad of publics, institutions, agencies, and policies. Given these circumstances, the essential question is whether a working definition of community and engagement is even possible. This paper will seek to address key questions arising from the definitional murkiness of community engagement. Fundamentally, these questions seek to provide insight about how archaeologists in urban spaces utilize and explore community-engaged work. Are there practices and frameworks that do and do not work? Finally, can we manipulate definitional confusion to intuit a better way forward?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow