Seeing, Thinking, Doing – Our TAG USA session on Friday!

Visit our session blog at http://seeingthinkingdoing.wordpress.com

For the past four months, Cat Cooper and I – with the help of our great friend and colleague Gareth Beale – have been putting together a multi-site session for TAG USA Chicago on ‘Seeing, Thinking, Doing: Visualisation as Archaeological Research’. Finally our planning culminates on Friday, when the session will run at 9.00am Chicago time, 3pm GMT.  We’ve got our fingers crossed that the technology holds up…

I think we were all overwhelmed by the response we received to our call for papers – so much so that we’ve devised various means to allow as many people as possible to contribute to the conversation. Whilst we can only steam the event between Chicago, Southampton, San Diego, and Victoria Canada (where I’ll be remotely helping to chair the session), we have

(1) set up a Twitter account (@visualarchaeo)

(2) Cat has put together a blog (http://seeingthinkingdoing.wordpress.com – & here you can find details of our diverse contributors)

(3) we’ve created a digital poster accompaniment to the session for some of those who weren’t able to give talks (see the posters & their abstracts here)

(4) we’ve put together a series of discussion questions that we’re hoping anyone with an interest in the subject matter will comment upon either via our blog (comment here) or by tweeting us at @visualarchaeo. We’d like to keep the debate going beyond the conference, so please do contribute!

Our discussion questions are prompted by the fact that various initiatives in recent years (including the recently-completed, English Heritage-sponsored Visualisation in Archaeology (VIA) project) have testified to a series of tensions and challenges confronting those who engage with archaeological visualisation. We would like to consider to what extent you find yourself negotiating with these issues, how you’ve worked to manage them, and where you see visualisation practice (in the sense of producing, circulating, receiving, and remixing visual media) taking both archaeologists themselves and general archaeological audiences in the future.

• What do you consider the biggest challenges facing the archaeological visualisation community in the upcoming years?
• Does the archaeological community embrace or encourage creativity and innovation in (visual) practice? If so, how so? If not, how might these be cultivated?
• To what extent do existing publication formats constrain or enable visual practice?
• How can the widespread desire for impressive, impactful visual outputs be balanced with intellectual integrity? Are stunning imagery and rigorous research objectives mutually exclusive?
• What do we know about archaeology’s viewing audiences? Who is interested in our work? How are they interpreting our outputs? What are they looking for? What inspires them?
• What is the relationship between ‘new’ and ‘old’ media in archaeology? What are the most powerful visual tools today (new or old) for facilitating archaeological research?
• How are we training the next generations of archaeological specialists? Should we be concerned about a loss of visual skillsets? How can we equip students to productively make and use visual media?

In sum:

Where do we go next? How can we continue to nurture a vibrant community of visual researchers and practitioners in archaeology? Who can we look to for inspiration?

We look forward to hearing your views!

Heritage Field School at York

As some of you know, this term I’ve designed and launched the department’s new ‘heritage practice’ module, intended to train the first cohort of York’s BA in Heritage Studies students in the field methods of heritage work. It is the equivalent of an archaeological field school, but focused here on hands-on heritage practice and assessment of key related skills. We are in the fortunate position of being able to collaborate with the Yorkshire Museum in the curation of the museum’s new exhibition After the Ice, opening later this month (24 May). In that context, the students (in two groups) are producing two short – 3-minute – videos for display both in the exhibition itself and online.

Some of our field school team working at the Yorkshire Museum with YMT staff in designing temporary displays and recording that design process (Photo by me).

For various reasons, I cannot post the full class outline/syllabus until later in the term, but the module has been crafted to provide students not only with experience in filmmaking, but so too with collections curation (designing temporary displays for several of the Yorkshire Museum’s display cabinets), archival research (re-presenting aspects of a large site archive which will soon go online with the ADS; as well as related media archives), qualitative and quantitative data collection and audience research (in the context of studying visitor reception of the After the Ice exhibition), excavation work itself, collaborative design (with 50 archaeology students) of interactive displays for the department’s own year-end exhibition, and full planning, promotion, and implementation of that latter event on 19 June.

The students are also blogging about their experiences of engaging with curatorial work, filmmaking and general heritage practice on two group blogs which they built and released yesterday. True to the nature of social media, we are circulating links to these blogs below so that others can follow our progress and comment – constructively – on that progress. To date, the students have been actively shaping their ideas in response to the feedback of YMT, filmmakers from around the world, other staff at York, heritage practitioners in Yorkshire, their peers and lecturers. We would like to invite you to contribute to this process of idea development via engagement with the students’ blogs. As I and others have discussed elsewhere, blogging is part of the wild side of public engagement, and my students have never blogged before nor exhibited their scholarly work in any public forum, so we appreciate your kind and constructive participation in our experimental efforts.

http://yorkstudentheritage.blogspot.co.uk/

http://tentativestepsheritage.blogspot.co.uk/

I have to acknowledge the many people who have come together to help facilitate this field school including Natalie McCaul (Curator of Archaeology at YMT), Martin Fell (Digital Team Lead at YMT), Gavin Repton (independent filmmaker), Tom Smith (Collaborative Software Specialist at University of York), Simon Davis (E-learning Adviser at University of York), Eve Firth and team (AV Centre at University of York), my colleagues in Archaeology at York, my two stellar teaching assistants who graduated from our MA in Cultural Heritage Management course last year and both now work full-time in the professional heritage sector in Yorkshire – and, in particular, the many filmmakers from around the world who have given their time to my students including Teri Brewer, Joe Tong, Stephanie Vierow, Sarah Fletcher and her team: Raven and Teesha; plus Angela Piccini and Howard Williams who generously directed me towards these filmmakers).

As you might be able to gather, it has been an adventure in coordination to bring together this module. Whilst I have implemented a new module every single term since I started my job (and there are 3 terms per year here), this has been – by far – the most difficult. That difficulty relates not only to the time commitment, but also (1) the fact that I am the sole coordinator of the module with an associated sense of deep responsibility for its success, and (2) the lack of other heritage fieldschool models (implemented in a university context) to help shape the course. There is a real feeling – both satisfying and frightening – of crafting something new entirely out of nothing, and I continue to seek examples of other people who have done the same thing elsewhere and who might be able to share their best practice.

I originally thought that my four years of work at Çatalhöyük would have been sufficient preparation for the creation of this module, given that we do very similar things in the field each summer with a team of new undergraduate students. But what’s become obvious is that, at Çatalhöyük, I am one of two or three other supervisors who are usually present with me for a short period of time at the start of our fieldwork to help set up that season’s efforts. And, of course, on top of that, there is the entire Çatalhöyük project team – now managed by the incredible Yildiz Dirmit – to facilitate such efforts and support me after the rest of the team departs. It wasn’t until this week that I became conscious of the importance of such support, because when all the little problems that inevitably manifest themselves in the field – problems with travel to site, or a misplaced piece of equipment, or a breakdown of technology, or personal matters that affect members of the team, etc. – do indeed manifest themselves, you have a series of other supervisors to call upon. I’m lucky to have two teaching assistants helping with some aspects of the module, and a small, insightful and enthusiastic cohort of heritage students. Nevertheless, I am always looking for advice on helping to manage the many responsibilities associated with such work, so if you have any tips, success strategies, troubleshooting recommendations, etc., I’d be so keen to hear them.

Your support of both me and my students’ efforts is always appreciated – thank you so much ++

Gender and Digital Culture

With the support of the University of Southampton’s Digital Humanities team and the University of York’s Centre for Digital Heritage, I’m working to coordinate a series of events that attend to the relationship between digital culture and gender. I’m looking for a paid assistant (from the University of Southampton, which is graciously funding the post) to contribute to the initial set-up and preparatory research for these events, and I’ve pasted details below for anyone in the humanities at Soton with an interest in matters of the digital.

I’ve been wanting to blog on these issues for over a year now, but the subject for me has been a sensitive one, and I was never quite sure how to approach it. The potential negative ramifications for speaking out seemed disproportionate to any possible benefit, and so I’ve sat silent wondering how best to manage my concerns. I enlisted help from a couple of my closest friends and colleagues, asking them to look for articles or related discussions about instances akin to mine, and simultaneously I started to do my own research.

Unfortunately, but meaningfully for me, over the past few months, several very high profile incidents have presented themselves that resonate with my experiences. Indeed, just today, the Times has published an article (not open access, disappointingly) on a comparable theme, headlined: “British universities in grip of ‘lad culture’ of misogyny, according to NUS”. Others, like Anita Sarkeesian, Mary Beard, Sarah Parmenter, Leigh Alexander, and see here, have all actively—and inspiringly— responded to what is disturbing but clearly indisputable gender-related harassment via digital/web-based media.

As for me, since 2011 I’ve experienced a series of separate episodes of being subjected to email or other social media-driven judgments on my appearance and sexuality. These were not simple, innocent remarks by friends and family, but often long, detailed descriptions and fantasy-like reflections about me sent in private messages direct to my personal email/Facebook accounts from colleagues around the world. The first incident was so absurd and unexpected that I just told a couple of my girlfriends at Southampton about it and had a bit of an uncomfortable laugh. The second incident was even more awkward and I began to feel incredibly self-conscious and embarrassed about how I was projecting myself to others. The third incident led me to silence – I no longer wanted to discuss it with anyone because it had become such a point of humiliation. All three of these incidents happened in 2011, and they were only the start of a trend that has continued since then.

But I’m exhausted now of burying the subject, and I wonder who it’s profiting to not attend to something that is demeaning and inappropriate both personally and professionally.

When I mentioned to others that I wanted to begin to think about how digital culture is implicated in these exchanges, I was met by a variety of reactions. Some rightly pointed out that digital media have far more connection to – and relevance for – gender than merely their application in derogatory ways. In other words, the conversation is a wide one, and I should think about how these tools can be (and are) wielded meaningfully, strategically, productively in other contexts.

At once, others implied that it was nonsensical for me to air my frustrations in public because it would lead people to question how they might appropriately address me in the future. On this point, I have to assert myself by saying that one could not possibly mistake innocent flattery (that is expressed publicly and is witnessable to all) with the types of private, explicit, long-winded, repeated and persistent messages that I’ve received through email. This is not debatable.

To that end, the University of York and the University of Southampton are coming together to talk through some of the many intersections, contentions, problematic and productive dimensions of gender and digital culture. Further description is below, including reference to other very visible cases of gendered abuse on the web of late. My experience is more in line with that of Leigh Alexander, but it impacts upon my life and my career, and as such, it is important to me.

Thanks as always for your support and constructive advice – I am so grateful. I am always keen for links, research articles, videos, and contacts on these issues, so please don’t hesitate to send them to me.

Gender & the Digital Events

Issues of gender and their relationship to digital technologies have had some presence in the news media lately, with Mary Beard and Sarah Parmenter being two amongst many individuals from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds who have actively responded to gendered and digitally fuelled character attacks. Such episodes are among a series of matters arising from applications of – and interactions with – digital tools that impact upon the professional and intellectual lives of scholars, and which consequently have implications for research, teaching and related practice.

In light of the University of Southampton’s and University of York’s growing digital humanities and digital heritage streams, Sara Perry (York) and Graeme Earl (Southampton) seek to organise a cross-institutional, live-streamed seminar (or series of seminars) in the spring time that bring(s) together specialists working in both the humanities and sciences for a critical conversation about their engagements with digital tools. We are looking for a postgraduate student to assist in coordinating the event(s) and to prepare a draft discussion document to help structure the debate. Work must be completed by 31 March 2013. The event will run after the Easter vacation.

Our interests are in exploring the (gendered) relationships between people and digital technologies: how, in tandem, they variously facilitate, exacerbate, rethink or replicate diverse behaviours. More specifically, we are interested in how these relationships operate in different disciplines in terms of professional and personal development, and how we equip individuals to use such technologies productively. The digital humanities have an important cross-disciplinary role to play not only in understanding how men and women engage with digital media – and how the media might recondition our research studies – but in preparing people for those studies themselves and for professional careers in all digitally-mediated disciplines.

Seeing, Thinking, Doing: Visualisation as Archaeological Research, Call for Papers, TAG USA

Just a very quick post to advertise the session that the wonderful Cat Cooper and I are organising at the Theoretical Archaeology Group USA conference in Chicago – 9 – 11 May 2013. The Call for Papers is below. We hope you’ll consider contributing to it or forwarding details to your interested colleagues.

Screenshot of TAG USA 2013 conference homepage. Hope you can join us!

We are in the unique situation of being able to stream the session through 4 sites: from Chicago itself, from the University of Victoria (Canada), from the University of Southampton (UK), and from the University of York (UK); so there are various intercontinental options for where to join the session. This means we welcome papers from anyone who is interested in participating remotely from one of these sites.

Deadline for submission of abstracts to Cat & myself is 1 March 2013. Don’t hesitate to contact us with queries.

Seeing, Thinking, Doing: Visualisation as Archaeological Research

Organizers: Catriona Cooper & Sara Perry

Research tends to begin with a series of observations on a site, object, monument or related space as it stands in the present, and leads to the construction of narratives which aim to craft a dialogue between that experience of the real today and the experience of the real in the recent and distant past. Visualisation is a critical methodology in such narrative creation—extending far beyond mere presentation of results into the actual constitution of data and the working and reworking of archaeological ideas. It is a key player, then, in the process of mediating the real. The visual tools we use (both new and old), their interactions with our ways of seeing, and the relationships between these interactions and our experiences on-the-ground — with collaborators, spaces, and other sensory engagements — affect how we do archaeology and conceive of the past. In other words, visual practices are intimately connected to different ways of thinking, and such connections can be (and have long been) exploited to productive effect.

This session seeks to explore such ideas via a session linked across two continents, broadcast online in the form of a series of ten minute papers followed by roundtable discussion. The discussion will be accessible to participants in Chicago, Victoria (Canada), and in the UK at both the University of York and University of Southampton. We welcome short papers introducing different methods of visualisation (including illustration, photography, survey, creative media or computer graphics) or different modes of collaborating visually. Our intention is to nurture a discussion around how vision and imaging impact upon archaeological knowledge creation, shaping our research and the future of our practice.

For more details see: http://tag2013.uchicago.edu/program.html#U

Many thanks for your interest and attention!

The Highs and Lows of the First Year of Lecturing

This blog post is prompted by my first ever job performance review which is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon with my academic mentor … eek!  I’ve been in my post for exactly one year, and as per our departmental requirements, I’m now obliged to sit down and reflect on my achievements, my defeats, my ambitions and goals for the future.  To be honest, it’s been a fairly simple task to draw together these reflections, as I’ve been ruminating on them for months—something that I assume is normal for anyone who is launched into a challenging post where the expectations are high and the potential to fail is equally great.  I’ve been spurred on, too, by an incredibly misconceived Forbes post by Susan Adams (subsequently amended in the wake of hundreds of critical retorts) which reports a CareerCast.com ranking of ‘university professor’ as the supposedly least stressful job of 2013.  You can read the backlash to this report in various places, including a thoughtful post (from the perspective of the American biomedical field) by another Forbes contributor and professor David Kroll. (Thanks to Will Deyamport for familiarising me with Kroll’s response via Twitter.)

Screenshot of responses to Forbes posting on CareerCast.com’s jobs ranking

Needless to say, I dispute CareerCast.com’s ranking.  My own experience of the job of lecturing is one of exceptional unsteadiness; of moving from a state of complete confidence and control in one instant, to total uncertainty and debilitating self-doubt in the next.  I would like to think that my PhD studies prepared me well for such transience, particularly as I taught and worked on multiple extra projects simultaneous with writing my thesis.  But until I was launched into the world of full-time employment, I couldn’t have known just how demanding the job could be.  As I see it, this relates fundamentally to the issue of accountability, because prior to last January, I was always a student or a researcher working under someone else’s guidance—in other words, I had my teachers’ support to prop me up in my weakest moments.  The second I stepped into my new post, however, others’ perceptions of my authority and, indeed, my own perceptions of myself changed.  And my sense of my level of responsibility—responsibility for my students, for my department, for my university, for my field of practice, and for myself and staying true to what I value and believe in—grew exponentially.

I love many things about my job.  I have developed an absolute adoration for teaching and mentoring students—the inspiration and complete awe that can be generated from participating in the process of learning is something quite profound.  I don’t know that I totally understood the profundity of this activity until I implemented some of my new modules over the past year.  Yes, there were moments of terror and lonesomeness when things didn’t go according to plan and I was left solitary—yet surrounded and exposed—in the middle of the classroom.  But those moments were outweighed by the wonder of watching the intellectual transformation of my students (and myself) as we worked through, for instance, the development of the students’ blogs, or as we managed to create an engaged critical debate about aspects of archaeological exhibitionary practice amongst a class of c. 40 Master’s students.  Just as these experiences were intimidating and sometimes very fleeting, they were also revelatory for me as a teacher and as a person.  The students’ reflectiveness forced reflectiveness in myself, such that a really clear feedback cycle presented itself which will impact on future iterations of my classes.

The other major thing that has been facilitated by my job has been the opportunity to meet and connect with inspiring researchers and genuinely wonderful human beings from around the world.  This year alone I contributed to a series of projects in Canada, the USA, Italy, Britain and Turkey, and I’m negotiating a couple of new collaborations for 2013 (fingers crossed).  I’ve been approached to run two different skills workshops in Canada and the USA with my anthropological colleagues, and I’ve been communicating with others – for instance the excellent Kristina Killgrove (University of West Florida) – about developing new curricula.  To be able to advise on such projects, to partner with such researchers, to share ideas and methods across disciplinary and international lines, is truly humbling.  It’s also possibly the greatest source of stress.  Because it’s in these moments when you realise that other people think you have expertise and understanding to offer.  It’s then that you feel the weight of responsibility for what you know and how you know it.  It’s then that the pressure to prove yourself kicks in, and, for me, that pressure can feel crushing.

I think I felt it most deeply when I met a student in the springtime during my office hours and it was clear that they were nervous to speak to me.  I found this a bit of an agonising experience, because I used to be in that position: I was the one who would go to others for guidance and input; indeed, not two months before, I was that very student, sitting in the chair during office hours, nervously speaking to my supervisors.  Now, however, I had become the person who was supposed to supply the advice.

I believe that the stressfulness of this situation is exacerbated by the number of obligations that one needs to fulfil on a daily basis as a lecturer.  Not only are you responsible for knowing all about your area of speciality and for helping students to grapple productively with that speciality themselves, but so too are you responsible for running your different undergraduate and Master’s programmes, and completing your various other administrative tasks, and publishing and getting grants and holding it all together flawlessly and discreetly—as though you’re an expert at everything.  The array of tasks for which you are accountable is breathtaking, and the predicament is made worse by the fact that you are answerable to so many different stakeholders simultaneously (both inside and outside the university).  This means there are very many opportunities for failure, and far fewer opportunities for being recognised for your successes.  Praise is fugitive in this line of work, and I think that’s perhaps the greatest travesty of the academic system.  It is very difficult to measure your progress given that for every recognised achievement (e.g., publishing an article; implementing a new class; etc.) there are innumerable other achievements that go unrecognised (e.g., responding to hundreds of emails a day), or that don’t go to plan (submitting a document that is demolished in the peer review process), or that are otherwise delayed whilst you’re busy with the rest of your work.  The most apt Twitter posting that I’ve read in the recent past was one on New Year’s Day, 1 January 2013, which said something to the effect of “Retweet this if you’re an academic and you’ve already missed a deadline for 2013.”  Nothing is more disheartening than this–nothing is more draining than completing one project but then having no time to appreciate the accomplishment because you’ve got multiple other overdue or pending assignments to attend to immediately.

I would like, then, to see better structures initiated for consistently and habitually commending scholars for their varied activities.  Such praise can go a long way towards managing feelings of inadequacy, of deluge, of self-consciousness and defeat – all symptoms of the imposter syndrome which I’ve blogged about before, and which I struggle with on a regular basis.

I am also convinced that the experiences of women in academia are fundamentally different to those of men.  This subject is one that I’m becoming increasingly passionate about owing to circumstances that I will blog about in the future; but I feel great concern about equipping female academics with the tools necessary to help them better navigate their day-to-day working relationships and plan for their careers in the long term.  I’d like to connect with others who are involved in women’s scholarly networks, so any recommendations or contacts you might have would be much appreciated.

I have great room for improvement as a lecturer, and I learn best from others’ experiences, so if you’d be willing to share your stories of success (and of negotiating failure), I’d be keen to hear them. I appreciate your support, your kind suggestions, your collaborations and general goodwill.  I couldn’t do this job without your help; I am endlessly grateful for it.

Experimenting with archaeological presentation in class work

Visual Media in Archaeology @ York – webpage screenshot

I’ve designed and am currently teaching a new third-year undergraduate module at York called Visual Media in Archaeology.  I wanted the class to allow students an opportunity to interrogate the intellectual and practical consequences of archaeological visualisation, but also to give them a chance to experiment with their own forms of production for various audiences.  In light of logistics, I decided to assign them the task of each creating their own blog on which they were to craft a narrative about an object or site of their choice.  I’ve been inspired by efforts like My Life as an Object and A Rock’s Story and York’s own Richard III Museum’s fictional Richard III Twitter feed: I wanted the students to think about how archaeologists tell stories, about what kinds of stories we can or could tell, about what stories we don’t or might not want to tell; and I wanted them to have the freedom to construct the narrative however they wished—fictional or non-fictional; image-driven or not; loose in structure or tightly woven; etc.

Several of my students have permitted me to blog about their blogs, and circulate links to the latter here (see below).  Whilst York is unique in having students put together an exhibition at the close of their first-year undergrad fieldwork season, for most of my third-years, these blogs represent their initiation into independently-authored, highly-public forms of presentation.  The group exhibition at the close of Year 1 is fundamentally different to these blogs for both obvious and not-so-obvious reasons: the former is a group effort (meaning a collective of individuals is accountable for the output, as opposed to just one person), it’s based at a specific site (in King’s Manor) on a specific day (usually a Wednesday at the end of the summer term) for a specific audience (students, staff, other interested locals), and its brief is very specific (using a particular medium of presentation, with a defined amount of text and image space, on a fixed subject).  Conversely, the independent blog is unwieldy, accessible to a large and completely undefined audience, and it subjects its creators to a level and degree of exposure whose consequences are hard to predict.

We have talked a lot about the implications of making work visible and critique-able by others via the web, and the potential fallouts of laying bare your ideas and self in an open forum.  These debates aren’t new, but they’ve been on my mind lately not only because of some questionable experiences I’ve had to deal with in the last couple of months (I’ll blog about those another time), but because of a talk that I was completely captivated by last week at the American Anthropological Association conference.  I immediately returned to York and told my students about it, as it entailed the anthropologist and NPR.org blogger Barbara King making a case for the ‘unafraid blogger’—someone who uses blogging as a form of journalism; who was prepared to accept that unfinished posts are not inherently disreputable or worthy of attack; who would try to resist the urge to take immediate offense to critique; and who would push the boundaries on traditional measures of success.  Barbara gave several fascinating examples of her own varied experiences in blogging for NPR.org (she talked, in particular, about this post and this post), and suggested that the commentary engendered by blogging stood at the “wild edge” of engagement.  Given that ‘wild edge’, one might instinctively want to run away from the process of blogging, but as I understood Barbara, the blog’s wildness is the very thing that we might capitalize on—embrace and experiment with.  In accepting its unpredictability, we are forced to rethink our work and ideas and our engrained ways of doing things, and out of that acceptance might come something extraordinary.

Below are links to 6 of my students’ blogs.  One of the students has already won a competition via her blog, and the students still have a couple of weeks left to develop and hone their content before they give their final presentations in December.  I post these links in the hopes that you’ll browse through the students’ work and, if you’re so inclined, comment – constructively – on what they’re experimenting with here.   This is their first time being exposed to the ‘wild edge’, and I appreciate you taking the time to participate productively in the ever-evolving process that is blogging.

Confessions of a Christmas Bauble

Student Life at the JBM Library York

A Complex Curiosity

The Incomplete Life of Dinosaurs

A Penny for your Thoughts (Children’s Blog)

The Diary of a Crystal Skull: What I Saw Today…

Anthropology, Archaeology, the British Curriculum and Sunny San Francisco

AAA 2012 – Our Visual Ethics Roundtable

I’ve arrived in San Francisco for what is my favourite scholarly event of each year, the American Anthropological Association annual conference.  This conference is certainly the most major of any that I typically attend, as it hosts upwards of 6,000 people – 6,000 anthropologists no less! – all populating the corridors and meeting rooms of the local Hilton or other such hotel (usually two hotels given the number of attendees).  It is also the place where I’ve listened to some of the best papers I’ve ever heard delivered at a scholarly gathering.  Last year, I sat in on a talk by Kathryn Denning who interrogated Gunther von Hagens’s new Animals Inside Out exhibition (which I saw in London a few months ago at the Natural History Museum), and his entrepreneurial foray into selling human and non-human animal body parts on the internet.  The year before I heard Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh give a completely spell-binding and, at once, disturbing account of the questionable development and curation of the 9-11 Memorial Museum.  Before that I attended a keynote speech by Alison Wylie on the epistemic productivity of collaboration — her talk fundamentally impacted the trajectory of my PhD, and provided critical testimony to why archaeologists (and other specialists) should be prioritising collaborative research.

These papers are ones that I have incorporated directly into my teaching, and which have stimulated some of the greatest debates that I’ve had with students and colleagues.  They are a witness to the power of anthropology as a discipline, I think, because they suggest the potential of anthropological theory and method to question common behaviours, expose slippery practices, rethink our intellectual agendas, and reshape the world around us—both in the past and in the present.  With that in mind, one of the great shames of the British educational system would appear, from my perspective, to be the divorcing of anthropology from archaeology in most university curricula.  I’m fortunate enough to work on a programme at York whose focus – cultural heritage – demands a broad-based interdisciplinary scholarship attending to the very research that animates anthropology: human culture.  However, not everyone is so lucky.

It seems a disservice to British students and budding archaeological practitioners that their exposure to anthropology is typically collapsed into a couple of theoretical lectures and a few assorted citations on course reading lists.  Having said this, I’m simultaneously struck by the creative practice that underlies a lot of the work being produced by British academic archaeologists.  There is a culture of experimentation, critique and openness to redesign that seems quite distinctive to the UK system.  Whilst there is also a sense of hostility towards such culture (cue previous posts about the ‘real archaeologist’), British archaeology has an element of the anthropological spirit that is otherwise often missing from the syllabus.  Various factors obviously work to facilitate this culture—institutionalised events like the Theoretical Archaeology Group meetings; the terrain of Britain itself and its concentration of departments of archaeology (which allow many people to meet up and toss ideas about more quickly and easily than in larger countries)—factors which hark back to Wylie’s point about the epistemic promise of dialogue/exchange.  Arguably the siloed nature of academic archaeology has also frustrated people to the extent that they’ve purposefully pushed on the boundaries of the discipline.  There seems to be a lot of potential and infrastructure here, then, to elaborate the nature of our practice by more explicitly and purposively drawing anthropology into our university programmes.

At the AAAs this week, I’ll be taking over the reigns of the position of Treasurer for the Society of Visual Anthropology (hence I have to attend a lot of business meetings), and I’ll also be chairing our 6^th Visual Ethics roundtable.  I’ve posted the details of the roundtable below, and it’s worth noting that archaeologists (British and North American!) are typically highly underrepresented at these events.  There’s no reason why this should be the case, and I’d like to change the demographic in the future, especially to help to break down cultural anthropologists’ own misguided assumptions that archaeologists don’t confront ethical issues that demand interrogation.

Given that this is also our 6^th year, it would be worthwhile to start experimenting with the format of the roundtable in the future, and so I’m keen for suggestions on opening up and changing its nature.  I say this now because the minute that we finish the session on Friday afternoon, Jonathan and I will begin to plan next year’s event.  We’re already looking for contributors – the CFP will be circulated in the new year and the conference is, very excitingly, set in Chicago! – so please get in touch if you might be willing to participate.

ON THE BORDERS OF THE IMAGE: A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION ON VISUAL ETHICS

Friday, November 16, 2012: 4:00PM-5.45PM

Hilton San Francisco – Continental 5

This roundtable discussion, organized on behalf of the Society for Visual Anthropology’s (SVA) Ethics Committee, seeks to continue the SVA’s now six-year-old tradition of nurturing debate and critical reflection on the ethics of anthropological imaging. Building on this year’s conference theme of “Borders and Crossings,” we probe anthropologists’ ethical negotiations with image creation, circulation, and consumption within and across disciplinary boundaries. Of particular interest is the iterative and unstable nature of image use—the navigation of visual value systems and moralities across time, space, cultural and institutional context, particularly when circumscribed by programmatic ethical review models. How have histories of anthropological, scientific, and related social-scientific practice impacted on our contemporary management of imagery? Where is representational authority situated in unstable, multiply-occupied/authored anthropological contexts? How are shifting visual technologies and intellectual paradigms disrupting or rearranging our ethical priorities? How do we anticipate and negotiate future relations with pictorial materials? What legacies are our current approaches to image ethics likely to leave behind?

Launching the roundtable, Esperanza attends to the implications of mass-produced ethnic artworks, using a case study of a Balinese community that has profited from the production and sale of African masks, Native American totem poles and Australian dijeridu, to name a few. She highlights changing ethical debates surrounding mass-produced ethnic art and the dilemmas involved in conducting fieldwork on this business, which often calls upon the ethnographer to translate, acquire sources and provide feedback for artisans/handicrafts producers who seek to learn “new” designs and aesthetics.

Johnson next problematizes her use of photographs and video in traditional knowledge research, primarily with Canadian First Nations. Her concerns are two-fold: (1) the difficulty of imagining and securing consent for photography and its potential future uses; & (2) power relationships: Who holds and can deploy the imagery? How can sharing this power be maintained over long periods? Where or how should images be archived? What about implicit contracts with the original subjects of the image, who may be deceased? Zane then contemplates the place of fiction filmmaking in anthropology via reference to his fieldwork on the Eastern Caribbean island of St. Vincent. Here, outsiders taking photographs of locals is placed in the same category as slavery; i.e., taking value without giving equivalent value in return.

Turning away from visual documentation of human subjects, Zane discusses his experiences in adopting fiction filmmaking to negotiate power imbalances between indigenous people and Western
filmmakers.

Finally, referring to videographic work in Ruginoasa, Eastern Romania, Rus reflects on ethical conflicts related to the documentation of intangible heritage in rural community life, particularly the filming of violent ritual. Rus questions the role of the anthropologist who records events which result in severe injuries, hospitalization and even traumatic cranial fractures, probing his obligations both to the community itself and to the police.

Taken together, the intent of this roundtable is to give practitioners an opportunity to discuss the ethical implications of in-progress or recently-completed visual research, and to draw upon the collective input of roundtable attendees to plan for or rethink our visual responsibilities.

Organizers:

Sara E Perry (University of York) and Jonathan S Marion (University of Arkansas)

Introductions:

Sara E Perry (University of York)

Chairs:

Jonathan S Marion (University of Arkansas) and Sara E Perry (University of York)

Roundtable Presenters:

Jennifer S Esperanza (Beloit College), Leslie Main Johnson (Athabasca University), Wallace W Zane (California State University and Santa

Monica College) and Alin Rus (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Hopefully see you at the AAAs this week!