Archaeological Praxis in the UAE: The roles of Critical Pedagogy and Public Engagement in testing the limits of the discipline, a talk by Uzma Rizvi (Pratt Institute) Harvard Archaeology Seminar

Date: 

Thursday, April 14, 2022, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Online

ABSTRACT:     Tracing almost a decade of work and archaeological inquiry in the UAE, this presentation draws our attention to how we can do archaeology in the service of equity and transformational justice. A key component of this approach foregrounds decolonial methodologies, while at the same time recognizing the distinctions between practicing such methods in a democracy as compared to an elective monarchy or ethnocracy. Mainstays of decolonial methods such as critical pedagogy and public engagement are necessarily redefined as they exist differently in highly regulated contexts. Archaeological and heritage practice find themselves most effectively expressed within the spaces of contemporary art, design, and architecture. Often these iterations push the boundaries of what we have been taught archaeology must be, leading the presentation to conclude with visioning our discipline differently.

BIO:     Uzma Z. Rizvi is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY; and Visiting Faculty in the Department of Archaeology, Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. With nearly two decades of work on decolonizing methodologies, intersectional and feminist strategies, and transdisciplinary approaches, Rizvi's work has intentionally pushed disciplinary limits, and demanded ethical decolonial praxis at all levels of engagement, from teaching to research.

 

 

This event is open to all and you are welcome to share .
If you are a department, program, or research center within Harvard and have interest in cosponsoring a talk, please feel free to reach out.
The series coordinators thank you for your continued engagement and support,
- Amy Arsenault   Jess Beck  &   Jason Ur