This academic year I am on sabbatical leave finishing three long-running projects and planning to focus more on applications of the archaeological imagination to matters of common and pressing contemporary concern, especially through design foresight and futures literacy. This is why I have put to one side my critical commentary on all things archaeological and…
Another contribution to an ongoing discussion at Stanford around the future of Classics and the Humanities [Link]. Colonial loot In 1897 a British military force burned and looted, murdered their way through the capital city of the kingdom of Benin in west Africa. It was another dreadful act aimed at securing political and economic control…
What future Classics? What’s the point of Classics and Classical Studies?What is the object(ive) of such a disciplinary field?What is the value in and of studying Greek and Roman antiquity? At Stanford we have started a series of conversations around these questions under the title Reframing Classics Our focus today – Postclassicisms – a book…
December 8 – 12 2020. Tamara (Carleton) and I were at the UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit [Link] representing our research group – Foresight at Stanford [Link]. We are standing for design foresight and what we are now calling creative pragmatics (in our forthcoming book – [Link]). Competencies, tools and techniques, mindsets not for predicting the…
Research-creation and scholartistry: a manifesto for research and learning From Michael Shanks Addressing the question “what does a researcher do?” and “what should researchers be doing?” Personal standpoint I am an archaeologist in a university, an academic researcher and scholar. It is typically held that archaeology researches the past by digging up sites and working…
Project: Future of Learning – [Link]Pedagogy: a personal manifesto – [Link] Let me try to cut through the avalanche of advice about online learning and summarize the essentials. Our schools and colleges have vacated their classrooms. The public high schools here in California seem to have just given up on any alternative. Others find themselves…