Plenary Sessions

 

Black Feminist Theory: Expanding Disciplinary Boundaries – Friday, April 30, 2021, 1:30PM

Ayana Flewellen, University of California, Riverside; Rachel Watkins, American University; Whitney Battle-Baptiste, University of Massachusetts; Kathleen Sterling, Binghamton University

By bringing together scholars from historical, per-historic, and biological archaeology, this session examines the flesh and texture of Black Feminist Thought and its permutations within the discipline. Black Feminist Thought within archaeological scholarship has been used to study the lived experiences of enslaved African Diasporic women from the 18th-century plantocracies of the Americas to studies examining the interactions between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans in Pleistocene Europe. As a theoretical and methodological framework, Black Feminist Thought, canonized by Patricia hill Collins, rests its foundations on Kimbrel Crenshaw’s conceptualization of intersectionality. Intersectional research has birthed expansive theoretically, methodologically robust scholarship examining the spatial and temporal specificities of operations of power and oppression. Black feminist theory within archaeological research is relatively new – less than twenty years old. The plenary session will illuminate the myriad of ways Black feminist theory, steadily expand disciplinary boundaries and the possibilities of future research.

 


Society for American Archaeology Task Force on Decolonization in North American Archaeology – Saturday, May 1, 2021, 8AM

Dorothy Lippert, Smithsonian Institution; Michael Wilcox, Stanford University; Davina Two Bears, Fort Lewis College; Patricia A. McAnany, University of North Carolina; George Nicholas, Simon Fraser University; Larry Zimmerman, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis; Margret Conkey, University of California, Berkeley; Randall McGuire, Binghamton University; Lindsay Martel Montgomery, University of Arizona; Wendy Teeter, UCLA

The Society for American Archaeology has created a task force charged with advising the SAA Board on actions the SAA can take to promote decolonization in our profession, including but not limited to overseeing a resource guide for members and educators, crafting proposals to expand membership of and event participation by Indigenous archaeologists, and other member suggestions communicated to the society in the June 28, 2020, petition from the Indigenous Archaeology Collective. This Task Force will work closely with the Committee on Native American Relations. The Board acknowledges that decolonization is a global concern. This Task Force will focus on immediate concerns in the United States and Canada. The Task Force will bring recommendations to the Board on a mutually agreed upon schedule to be determined. The task force to date, has focused on how to decolonialize the SAA as key to decolonializing North American archaeology. How do we establish true collaboration between North American archaeologists and Indigenous peoples rather than just interacting around conflicts and events. Members of the task force will do a short presentation on the task force and what progress it has made. We will then throw open the floor for a listening session to get input from TAG participants.

 


Rethinking Archaeological Pedagogies – Sunday, May 2, 2021, 8AM

Organized by the Archaeology Centers Coalition Pedagogy Committee and Columbia Center for Archaeology (Zoe Crossland, Columbia University; Sara Gonzalez, University of Washington; Andrew Bauer, Stanford University; Ryan Wheeler, Andover); Megan Bang, Northwestern University; Anna Agbe-Davies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Sara Gonzalez, University of Washington; Gloria Wilson, University of Arizona

We propose a conversation about current and future archaeological pedagogies, inviting scholars who work at the intersection of Education and Black and Indigenous Studies to speak about the work they have done to decolonize the syllabus, rethink curricula and develop inclusive teaching strategies. We will invite four panelists (two archaeologists and two speakers from education) to discuss how insights from education could be brought into archaeological teaching, including lab and field based contexts. We will discuss how archaeological curricula are commonly structured and how this might be re-imagined. We will then open to the audience for questions. Discussion points will be circulated among the panelists in advance of the event so that they can anticipate the flow of the conversation and questions that might come up from the audience.

Follow up workshop: The plenary panel will be followed by a 90-minute workshop broken up into moderated groups. We will ask participants to share how they currently organize their curricula, suggest specific readings, and outline any changes they have made and how they imagine going forward. We will document these discussions to develop a pedagogical resources document. Prior to the plenary panel and workshop we will call for archaeology syllabi that develop antiracist and decolonial pedagogy. We will host these on the TAG website, and use them as a starting point for discussions in the breakout workshops.

 


Reckoning with Settler Colonialism: Structural Violence and Social Justice in North American Anthropology – Saturday, May 1, 2021, 1PM

Lindsay Montgomery, University of Arizona; Nicholas Laluk, Northern Arizona University; Philip Deloria, Harvard University; Manulani Aluli Meyer, University of Hawaii West Oahu; Adam Gaudry University of Alberta; Mishuana Goeman, University of California-Los Angeles; Wendy Teeter, University of California-Los Angeles; Kekuewa Kikiloi, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa

The foundational premise of settler colonial studies is that settler invasion is a structure which seeks to dispossess Indigenous people of their lands (Wolfe 2006). This structure is informed by a logic of elimination (i.e. Indigenous eradication through violence and assimilation) and containment (i.e. physical isolation on reservations and de facto segregation within labor markets, education, and politics). Elimination and containment are forms of structural violence or what Bryan Brayboy and Jeremiah Chin (2020) have called “terrortory” legally supported policies and practices that reinforce white hegemony and settler power. While settler colonialism has proven to be a resilient structure in North America, structures can be torn down. The historical and material records are loci of both weak social power vis a vie settler colonial states while also containing significant social memory shaping potential. How can archaeologists work to dismantle institutions and practices that reinforce white hegemony? What role does archival scholarship play in challenging deficit narratives of Indigenous absence and underachievement? How might the discipline of anthropology more broadly contribute to the equitable redistribution of opportunities and resources? In pursuing social justice, should scholars draw on rights-based frameworks rooted in universal moral principles or an “ethics of care” which stresses responsibility and mutual obligation. Through a series of lightning round talks and extended dialogue, panelists in the session will address these questions and discuss what social justice and reconciliation mean within contexts of ongoing settler colonialism.