Hey everyone! I hope you’ve all had a good Winter semester and that these last few weeks of classes and good ol’ paper writing season hasn’t got you too stressed out. As always, a lot has happened to me both (research-wise and personally) since my last post went up. By now, the bulk of the data to be used for my thesis has been gathered and I’m well into my last stage of research, which is of course, writing. However, for fear of sounding whiny and complaining -thesis writing is really hard! I won’t to speak too much on that subject today. I will though let you know that my research group and I decided to form our very own “Shut Up and Write” session. Everything Thursday afternoon in the seminar room, we meet for 2-4 hours to just sit there and well, you guessed it, write! The rules are simple: there’s no talking, and preferably (although not necessarily) no internet. We’ve opened it up to anyone in and around the department with a project on the go. Coffee and snacks are usually provided and the idea is to make the writing process a little more fun or at the very least, a little less stressful of an experience for everyone. Although I wouldn’t quite describe these sessions as social events, we are sort of peer-pressuring each other into getting things done and I must say, so far, I’ve found them to be pretty effective. One time, I managed to get a whole section of my thesis drafted and just last week, I was able to complete an abstract (I’m usually guilty of spending wayyy too much time on those) for a conference I plan to attend in Manitoba later this spring.
While I may only be in the early stages of actual thesis writing, as the title for this post suggests, I’ve already been busy “getting my research out there.” There are certainly aspects of my research that I’ve been promoting from the very beginning, but a new level of more formalized research dissemination began for me back in the first week of January. I travelled to New Orleans to give a paper on my team’s research and the progress we’ve made within our project’s first year at the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) annual conference. As I’ve expressed on the blog before, public speaking actually makes me incredibly nervous and to top it off, this was my first time even attending a real archaeology conference. Through all of the anxiety, I still managed to have a great time and I was really pleased to get to share our research (on Colonial Saint-Pierre et Miquelon) in an all-day session on the French presence in the New World in the one and only New Orleans’ French Quarter!
Since the SHA’s, I’ve done several more talks including everything from promoting next year’s field school with prospective undergraduate students to updating my department on my thesis research to even giving a guest lecture for those enrolled in a Department of Folklore Material Culture undergraduate course. Each talk has been similar (in that it somehow revolved around my research) but different (in that the audiences varied significant) and so, each one was a really valuable experience. Getting up and talking about my work in front of a room full of historical archaeologists was different from talking to a room full of every kind of archaeologist, and that, of course, was super different from talking to a room of non-archaeologists or individuals who have maybe only ever taken an arky class or two before. Within the coming months, I’ll have a couple more presentations to do too –some of them academic but some of them not –and this brings me to a point I think is really interesting about conducting research these days – it’s not all about what’s going on within academic circles anymore!
Now, I will fully admit I don’t know too much about the average graduate student experience for those of you in programs like hard sciences or engineering but it seems to me, that for those of us in social sciences, there’s been a real shift towards conducting research in a way that’s consider accountable to the communities that we study –at least, that’s very much the case with archaeology. I’ve said before that archaeologists might study the dead but that the work we do has real implications for the living –and the more time I spend here at MUN, the more I am convinced of this. You can see it most when examining all of the different ways my colleagues and I work with and alongside the public. Sometimes we have formalized community partnerships, sometimes it’s the contemporary community who has requested we come there to do the work, and sometimes it’s the archaeologists who conceive the research questions but it’s our job to make sure the results don’t stay confined within academic circles. Projects in our department vary from research that is entirely community based to research that is very community engaged and everything in between.
Regardless of where our research falls on that spectrum, my colleagues and I use a lot of the same methods when it comes to “getting our research out there” beyond academia –and social media is, of course, a big one! I know my friends who work up North find Facebook (pages and/or groups) to be a really effective way of sharing aspects of their work with their specific communities. Most of us also have a Twitter or Instagram account we use to share pictures of what we’ve been up to with anyone whose interested (be it fellow archaeologists or local community members). Our department encourages us to promote what we do through these different platforms and even has a “Social Media Best Practices” notice posted in our building with tips and tricks for us to keep in mind. The notice advises us to keep our posts short and concise and to ensure we have permission from people before posting things online. It encourages us to use pictures or be as visually engaging as possible while also being professional and not posting anything that could be deemed inappropriate or even unethical –for us, that usually means don’t post human remains or cultural sensitive materials.
Another thing we tend to do is host and/or facilitate community oriented events. Although attending conferences and publishing papers it certainly important, it is in my experience that sometimes the most rewarding aspects of our job can be sharing our work with the people it affects most (the descendant communities of the cultures we study for example). Many of us tend to do this through presentations, community meetings, and maybe even artefact workshops. We tend to engage with local media –like newspapers and radio stations -though some of us have even been interviewed by German documentary films makers but you’re going to have to ask my colleague Jacinda Sinclair about that one! In addition to these community events, I know most of us tend to adopt an open-door policy when it comes to fieldwork. In Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, our study area is located just outside of town and we make sure to advertise within the community that the site is actually open to the public. We encourage them to stop by anytime to see what we’ve been up to and the field school students give small presentations regarding our progress at the end of each week. We also implemented an “archaeologist for the day” program for locals, particularly youths, to come join the dig for an afternoon and learn about the excavation process. For my friends who work in Labrador, sometimes their study areas are located outside of town or along coastlines that are only accessible by boat. As a result, they tend to make their lab spaces (which are situated in town) open to the public instead and both approaches are a really great way to build lasting relationships with the communities we’re working in.
If you’re interested in gathering more inspiration for ways of “getting your research out there,” here’s a couple of events worth checking out:
The 20th Annual Aldrich Interdisciplinary Graduate Research Conference
See http://aldrich.gsumun.ca/ for more details
SGS Public Scholar Workshop: Using Social Media
March 29, 2018
This event is designed with grad students in mind but is open for anyone to attend!
You can RSVP by contacting awilliam@mun.ca or visit www.mun.ca/sgs for more details
Thanks so much for reading,
~Meghann http://www.tb-credit.ru/znk.html http://www.otc-certified-store.com/stop-smoking-medicine-usa.html