activateCHAT (Contemporary and historical archaeology in theory)

Contemporary and historical archaeological theory-and-practice have matured significantly since CHAT first emerged in 2003. The variety of fieldwork methods has grown, from filmmaking and sound-recording to walking as research to the careful documentation of ‘waste’, to socially engaged art in the public realm, to the critical-creative use of scanning and imaging technologies. These methods ACTIVATE new material and spatial insights . into the ongoing legacies of colonialism; into the operation of power structures; into practices that produce beauty and ‘otherwiseness’ out of idiosyncratic ‘capitalist cracks’; into how to stimulate conversations about the material workings of complicity, recuperation, subversion, divergence, and the liberation of humans and non-humans from extant racialised, gendered, class-based inequalities. Global politics is busily transformed by a handful of dangerous demagogues and billionaires! The planet is burning! While never have so many people had access to so many tools and to each other, we squander this in ‘busy-ness’. It is time to ACTIVATE! How can Contemporary and Historical Archaeological Theory and Practice ACTIVATE social, cultural, and political change? How might this generate understandings of what change means, what changes are needed and for whom? Who do people need to work with and through which media, materials, processes? Where do people need to be working? How do people build and/or strengthen working relationships across disciplines and across the academic, public, third and private sectors?