{"title":"Education as Liberation: Using Archaeology to Serve Modern Working Class Needs","authors":"V. Camille Westmont","doi":"10.1007/s11759-024-09514-8","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The working classes have been overlooked as a population that could benefit from social-justice-oriented critical public archaeology approaches. The Anthracite Heritage Program sought to address this gap by targeting educational attainment among students in the historically working class, chronically underserved northeastern Pennsylvania region. Public archaeology initiatives to promote interest and knowledge about undergraduate education revealed that the archaeologists’ greatest contribution was our own (class-based) knowledge of the intricacies of university admissions, funding, and life in the United States. In this way, the project ended up serving underserved communities in the ways that they needed help the most: securing the knowledge to attain class mobility.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":44740,"journal":{"name":"Archaeologies-Journal of the World Archaeological Congress","volume":"20 3","pages":"620 - 642"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11759-024-09514-8.pdf","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Archaeologies-Journal of the World Archaeological Congress","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11759-024-09514-8","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"ARCHAEOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The working classes have been overlooked as a population that could benefit from social-justice-oriented critical public archaeology approaches. The Anthracite Heritage Program sought to address this gap by targeting educational attainment among students in the historically working class, chronically underserved northeastern Pennsylvania region. Public archaeology initiatives to promote interest and knowledge about undergraduate education revealed that the archaeologists’ greatest contribution was our own (class-based) knowledge of the intricacies of university admissions, funding, and life in the United States. In this way, the project ended up serving underserved communities in the ways that they needed help the most: securing the knowledge to attain class mobility.
期刊介绍:
Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress offers a venue for debates and topical issues, through peer-reviewed articles, reports and reviews. It emphasizes contributions that seek to recenter (or decenter) archaeology, and that challenge local and global power geometries.
Areas of interest include ethics and archaeology; public archaeology; legacies of colonialism and nationalism within the discipline; the interplay of local and global archaeological traditions; theory and archaeology; the discipline’s involvement in projects of memory, identity, and restitution; and rights and ethics relating to cultural property, issues of acquisition, custodianship, conservation, and display.
Recognizing the importance of non-Western epistemologies and intellectual traditions, the journal publishes some material in nonstandard format, including dialogues; annotated photographic essays; transcripts of public events; and statements from elders, custodians, descent groups and individuals.