{"id":503,"date":"2017-05-26T01:26:52","date_gmt":"2017-05-26T01:26:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/?p=503"},"modified":"2017-06-22T16:24:26","modified_gmt":"2017-06-22T16:24:26","slug":"public-access-to-the-exclusive-academia-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/public-access-to-the-exclusive-academia-club\/","title":{"rendered":"Public access to the exclusive academia club!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"natasha3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hello all! Hope you are as excited as me to be moving closer and closer to the summer.<\/p>\n

After visiting warm and uncharacteristically sunny Vancouver in early April and being welcomed back to St. John\u2019s by a wonderful winter storm that left me stranded in Toronto for two days\u2026 summer can\u2019t come soon enough.<\/p>\n

The warm weather was not the only thing that got me really excited about being in Vancouver though. I was there for the Society for American Archaeology Annual Meeting which presented inspiring research and insightful new directions for the field of archaeology.<\/p>\n

Two sessions that really resonated with me were Mobilizing the Past: Archaeology as Activism <\/em>(chaired by MUN\u2019s own Meghan Walley) and \u201cSo do you, like, wear a hat like Indy?\u201d \u201cCool, I love dinosaurs!\u201d \u201cMy grandpa has a really awesome pot in his attic.\u201d \u201cCan you shut down the pipeline?\u201d \u2013 Effective Communication about Archaeology in Three Minutes or Less<\/em> (sponsored by Public Education Committee and Public Archaeology Interest Group).<\/p>\n

The great thing about these international conferences is you get the great opportunity to hear about ideas and research outside your direct area of study that have the potential to sprout in your brain and change the way you think about the work and the discipline. These sessions had this effect on me and I came out of them with the realization that: Archaeology, as much as it has adopted many new technologies to investigate human behavior throughout history, is still stuck in the past, which causes difficulties in making archaeology relevant and communicating archaeological findings to the general public.<\/p>\n

This is not to diss everyone in archaeology!!! Obviously, there are archaeologists out there who are doing excellent outreach and producing archaeological work that is influencing public policy, education, and social development! But I did go to many paper and poster presentations that were heavy on jargon, bar graphs, and diagrams of archaeological layer profiles, that didn\u2019t answer the question \u201cwhy should I care?\u201d or maybe more specifically \u201cwhy should non-archaeologists care?\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of these presentations were particularly distancing. In fact, one day, I heard two geochemists (outsiders) who were presenting in an archaeological sciences session talking to each other and one asked the other \u201cAre you an alien too?\u201d I can just imagine what Indigenous community members would have felt like if they had gone to these sessions which were rich in stable isotope data and poor in effective communication.<\/p>\n

I heard many archaeologists complaining about how difficult it is to reach the public on a personal level and interesting them\/inciting them to care. And while this was a common theme, this conference remains very exclusive. You had to pay a high price to get in, not only to attend, but also to become a member of the association to even be eligible to present. They didn\u2019t make it easy for outsiders to attend.<\/p>\n

One sentence I found myself repeating a lot is that \u201carchaeology needs a face lift\u201d.<\/p>\n

I think that there could be a couple things that we could do as academic archaeologists to make these international conferences a little bit more accessible.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Have students organize conference sessions! <\/strong>This is not the norm as I came to find out, yet it is often students coming into the field that have the freshest ideas on how to communicate their research to a larger audience maybe due to the fact that we are connected to a larger global community by the grace of our divers networking spheres.<\/li>\n
  2. TWEET!<\/strong> INSTA! FLICK\u2019R! YOUTUBE IT! <\/strong>Get the message out there. Show people what you do day to day! Show why our work matters! Show who it matters to! Show why the past is political as a speaker said, just think about the famous: \u201cMake America Great\u2026 AGAIN\u201d. Archaeology can be used to contextualize issues we are dealing with today! These short formats of communicating research are the best ways to communicate our research to the public. Let\u2019s use them!<\/li>\n
  3. HOLD MORE PUBLIC SESSIONS!<\/strong> Invite the people in! I guarantee, they are interested.<\/li>\n
  4. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE!<\/strong> Even if you are presenting in a session on Archaeological Sciences, recognize that many people that will be attending will be outsiders and may not be super familiar with the field\u2019s lingo. Make your talks more concise, sometimes less is more.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So those are my two-cents. Let\u2019s keep the conversation going! I know I\u2019ve learned a lot and will be doing my own part to communicate my research to a broader audience.<\/p>\n

    Thanks to Memorial\u2019s Quick Start Fund through the Office of Public Engagement, I\u2019ve been given the chance to travel to Sechelt, British Columbia, this summer to meet with the sh\u00edsh\u00e1lh band and council and share my Master\u2019s research results with them and hopefully start a dialogue with them about how we can work together in the future. The challenge will be to present in a format that invites questions and conversation, accessible to non-archaeologists.<\/p>\n

    TTYL,<\/p>\n

    ~Natasha<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Hello all! Hope you are as excited as me to be moving closer and closer to the summer. After visiting warm and uncharacteristically sunny Vancouver in early April and being welcomed back to St. John\u2019s by a wonderful winter storm that left me stranded in Toronto for two days\u2026 summer can\u2019t come soon enough. The … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-natasha-leclerc","4":"post-503","6":"format-standard","7":"category-student-blog"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":507,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503\/revisions\/507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mun.ca\/studentblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}