For its 21st year, CHAT comes to Plymouth. People from across the creative and cultural industries and academia will respond to the themes ‘ACTIVATE’ and ‘BUSY’ through archaeologies spanning the post-medieval to the present and future.
If archaeology explores material change through time, how can creative archaeological practices inform understandings of the terms ACTIVATE – activisms, actions, beginnings, enlivenings – and BUSY – late capitalist work culture, being occupied, cluttered, neoliberal wellness mantra? What are the contemporary and historical archaeological forms of ACTIVATE and BUSY – as both separate and intersecting themes – and how might this inform the way we (might) live?
Through papers, tours, creative practice-as-research and social gathering, the conference will explore new material and spatial insights into the ongoing legacies of colonialism, the operation of power structures, and practices that produce beauty and ‘otherwiseness’ out of idiosyncratic ‘capitalist cracks’. We wish 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.
How does this work ACTIVATE social, cultural, and political change? What changes are needed and for whom? How will we recognise change? And with activation comes busy-ness. Across all sectors people now experience the sensation of overwhelming busy-ness in ‘bullshit jobs’ (cf. David Graeber) – precarious, casualised, in service mainly to Excel and Outlook. How do the themes of ACTIVATE and BUSY intersect over time? How might archaeology – in its most expansive terms – generate understandings of what keeps us too ‘busy’ to enact the social, cultural, and political changes we want to manifest? Who is included/excluded from this ‘busy-ness’? What are the material manifestations of ‘busy’ and resistance to being so ‘busy’? How do we account for our own role in being ‘busy’? How have others responded non-violently, creatively, and inclusively to increased demand to ‘keep busy’ and what are the archaeological traces of these forms of resistance? How have people and collectives avoided making their ‘going slow’ becoming someone else’s being busy?
This conference is open to all but will be of particular interest to academics and postgraduate researchers.
Please contact activatechat@plymouth.ac.uk for conference information and queries.