Case Studies
Students in Archaeology and Society, a seminar organized by Jody Valentine at Pomona College in fall of 2022, created the following chapters as a set of resources for our own learning as a community. We are publishing them here so that our work might inform and inspire others who are also interested in the ethical and theoretical implications and creative potentialities that emerge through our social, cultural, and individual engagement with things.
Contributors were offered this prompt:
As a participant in this course, you will develop, research, organize, and publish your own case study. You may choose to focus on a specific archaeological project, a museum collection, or an individual artifact through the lens of one (or more) ethical or theoretical question. Your project will culminate in a multi-media Pressbook Chapter that may include visual, written, video, and/or audio content. Your publication should be two-fold: First, present your research and conduct a thorough critical analysis of your site. Second, present a concrete, creative suggestion for how to resolve one or more of the ethical or theoretical problems that you discovered and analyzed. You may collaborate with one or more colleague on some (or all) of this project, e.g. you may produce an interview or discussion-style podcast that weaves together two projects or you may choose one topic and work on it together from start to finish. We will develop these projects in stages throughout the semester: in small-group workshops, through meetings with the faculty, and with guidance from Jennifer Beamer, the head of Scholarly Productions and Open Publishing at the Claremont Colleges Library. As you consider to best present your project (whether as a podcast, video, illustrated written post, combination of various formats. etc.), please consider how the medium shapes the message. Ask: how might creating a podcast or video together with written and/or visual content support innovative ways of understanding and communicating ideas about the relationship between people, places, and things?
