Archaeology Faculty Receive CU Seed Grant to Address Racism
Professors Zoë Crossland, Brian Boyd, Hannah Chazin, Terence D’Altroy, Severin Fowles of the Columbia Center for Archaeology are a part of larger initiative across seven disciplines at Columbia that have received the recently announced Addressing Racism: A Call to Action for Columbia Faculty Seed Grant Opportunity. Their proposal is entitled "Addressing Racism Seed Grant Initiative: Rethinking archaeological pedagogy at Columbia and in the discipline."
The project aims to develop a series of workshops aimed at faculty and students that will build an interdisciplinary conversation at Columbia about curriculum, syllabi, inclusive pedagogical methods, and mentoring. It then aims to scale this conversation up and out to other universities across the US, with the end goal of creating resources that can be drawn upon by faculty in designing and redesigning their teaching and curricula. This project has been developed in close collaboration with the Society of Black Archaeologists, and the Archaeology Centers Coalition.
Columbia Archaeology Faculty Join the Archaeology Centers Coalition
The archaeology faculty of Columbia's Department of Anthropology have come together with other US based archaeology centers to address systemic racism in all spheres of institutional life. This initiative was born out of a series of conversations in the wake of the George Floyd murders, and in collaboration with the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA), the Indigenous Archaeology Collective (IAC), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, SAPIENS, and the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies (CIAMS). The first initiative of this coalition is the development and support of a webinar series entitled “From the Margins to the Mainstream: Black and Indigenous Futures in Archaeology”. Beginning last July and continuing through April 2021, this webinar series seeks to reshape the stories that archaeology tells and who tells them. Key themes include monuments and memory, the archaeology of redress, and cultural stewardship. The coalition aims to continue these conversations, developing a series of best practices recommendations to overcome barriers of inclusion.
