Columbia Center for Archaeology Online Salon

Prof. Uzma Rizvi
Social Science & Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute

Archaeological Praxis in the United Arab Emirates:
The roles of Critical Pedagogy and Public Engagement in testing the limits of the discipline

Friday 11th February, 5.10pm ET (online)

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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.

Biography: Prof Rizvi is an anthropological archaeologist specializing in the archaeology of the first cities. She teaches anthropology, ancient urbanism, new materialisms, critical heritage studies, memory and war/trauma studies, decolonization/the postcolonial critique, and social practice. Her own work intentionally interweaves archaeology with cultural criticism, philosophy, critical theory, art, and design. With nearly two decades of work on decolonizing methodologies, intersectional and feminist strategies, and transdisciplinary approaches, her work has intentionally pushed disciplinary limits, and demanded ethical decolonial praxis at all levels of engagement, from teaching to research. She is currently the Principal Investigator (w/Can Sucuoglu) for the Laboratory for Integrated Archaeological Visualization and Heritage (LIAVH.org), an interdisciplinary space bringing together archaeological research with data management, visualization, and heritage practice.

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