Events

Archaeological Sensibility

Archaeological Sensibility
Conference organized by François G. Richard (UChicago, Anthropology)

Wednesday 6 July 2022
& Thursday 7 July 2022

PROGRAM

Abstracts

Register here to attend in person
(6 rue Thomas Mann, Paris 13e)

Register here to attend online
(Zoom)

Archaeology is at a crossroads, an exciting moment of self-introspection and redefinition. Over the last two decades, archaeology’s bread-and-butter issues – material worlds and the juxtaposition of layered histories over the long-term – have become central points of interest in the wider social sciences, the arts, and humanities. Concurrently, archaeologically minded approaches are diffusing beyond the discipline, and influencing research and aesthetic practices elsewhere.

What if, then, ‘archaeology’ was no longer moored to its disciplinary identity, but a widely shared sensibility to materialness, a perceptual and imaginative resonance with the pasts and memories that things and landscapes hold? What if not just a field of knowledge, buoyed by its traditions and techniques, ‘archaeology’ was a fundamental aesthetic attunement to arrangements and rearrangements of matter, and the reflections they provoke about time, world, and history.

Our aim in this conference is to take stock of these transformations and critically ponder archaeology’s changing contours. Specifically, we reflect on the idea that ‘archaeology’ has become (or perhaps that it is (re)discovering it always was) a way of feeling and thinking, and a mode of relating to the material world – a sensibility -- that has traction beyond the discipline and offers valuable openings for conversations, challenges, and problems we face today, as they weave across past, present, and future.

Participants: Adela Amaral (College of William & Mary); Shannon Dawdy (UChicago); Caitlin DeSilvey (University of Exeter); Benjamin Efrati (EHESS); Emma Gilheany (UChicago); Alfredo González-Ruibal (Incipit/CSIC) Gaston Gordillo (University of British Columbia); Martin Grünfeld (University of Copenhagen); Rémi Hadad (University College London/Université Paris Nanterre); Anne-Violaine Houcke (Université Paris Nanterre); Carolina Kobelinksy (CNRS/Université Paris Nanterre); Saadia Mirza (UChicago); Yael Navaro (University of Cambridge); Uzma Rizvi (Pratt Institute); Sandra Rozental (UAM Cuajimalpa); Mudit Trivedi (Stanford University).

PROGRAM

Abstracts

Register here to attend in person
(6 rue Thomas Mann, Paris 13e)

Register here to attend online
(Zoom)