The Interdisciplinary Archaeology Workshop is now accepting submissions for the 2020-2021 academic year!

Looking for feedback on a conference paper, MA thesis, or dissertation chapter you’ve been working on? Have you been catching up on field reports and archival research over the past few months? The Interdisciplinary Archaeology Workshop is now accepting submissions for the 2020-2021 academic year.

This year, our theme is the archaeology of sovereignty. This includes state formation and citizenship, as well as broader questions of boundaries, borders, world-building, and the politics of archaeological knowledge production. Archaeologists draw on a variety of methodological approaches from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities—in doing so, what kinds of sovereignty do archaeologists create, enforce, and obscure in the discipline and in the world? We’re calling for presentations that touch upon these themes, and we’re trying out a new optional format.

Students workshopping papers and presentations can choose to participate in the “Talking Behind Your Back” exercise created at the University of Minnesota. This involves a discussion of the author’s work in which the presenter must listen without contributing, allowing them to understand the impact of their ideas on an interdisciplinary group of scholars (email for more details).

If you are interested in presenting a paper or an ongoing analysis to IAW, please contact Luiza Osorio G. da Silva (losilva@uchicago.edu) and Nikki Grigg (ngrigg@uchicago.edu) with the following information:

Additionally, please email us if you have suggestions for guest speakers for next year or would like to be added to the IAW listserv. Since next year’s workshop is likely to be virtual for much of the year, we’re working to invite guests who would normally not be able to travel to campus.

–        Nikki and Luiza