Education as Liberation: Using Archaeology to Serve Modern Working Class Needs

Education as Liberation: Using Archaeology to Serve Modern Working Class Needs V. Camille Westmont , Department of Anthropology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, 402 10th Avenue South, UH3165, Birmingham, AL 35294-1241, USA; McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3ER, UK E-mail: RESEARCH Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress (Ó 2024) https://doi.org/10.1007/s11759-024-09514-8 Accepted: 2 August 2024 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. Résumé: Les classes ouvrières ont été négligées en tant que population susceptible de bénéficier des approches de l’archéologie publique critique axée sur la justice sociale. L’Anthracite Heritage Program s’est attaché à réduire cette carence en ciblant un degré d’instruction élevé parmi les étudiants issus de la Pennsylvanie du nord-est, une région historiquement ouvrière et constamment négligée. Les initiatives d’archéologie publique afin de promouvoir l’intérêt et la sensibilisation quant à l’éducation universitaire ont révélé que la contribution ultime des archéologues était notre propre connaissance (fondée sur les classes) des complexités relatives aux admissions, au financement et à la vie en lien avec l’université aux États-Unis. Le projet a ainsi abouti à apporter une assistance aux communautés négligées des manières dont elles avaient le plus besoin: obtenir les connaissances pour parvenir à une mobilité sociale. ________________________________________________________________ Ó 2024 The Author(s). This article is an open access publication ARCHAEOLOGIES ________________________________________________________________ V. CAMILLE WESTMONT Resumen: Las clases trabajadoras han sido ignoradas como una población que podrı́a beneficiarse de enfoques de arqueologı́a pública crı́tica orientados a la justicia social. El Programa Anthracite Heritage buscó abordar esta brecha al apuntar al logro educativo entre los estudiantes de la región del noreste de Pensilvania, históricamente de clase trabajadora y crónicamente desatendida. Las iniciativas de arqueologı́a pública para promover el interés y el conocimiento sobre la educación universitaria revelaron que la mayor contribución de los arqueólogos fue nuestro propio conocimiento (basado en un enfoque de clase) de las complejidades de las admisiones universitarias, la financiación y la vida en los Estados Unidos. De esta manera, el proyecto terminó sirviendo a las comunidades desatendidas en las formas en que más necesitaban ayuda: asegurando el conocimiento para lograr la movilidad de clase. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ KEY WORDS Working class, Public archaeology, Social justice, Students _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Introduction Public archaeology has been generally accepted as a form of (participatory) heritage making that can be used to pursue social justice aims. Scholars have extensively documented the effect publicly engaged archaeology can have on descendant and stakeholder communities, particularly those that have experienced marginalization or disenfranchisement. In these situations, archaeologists have sought to challenge the status quo by using archaeological methods to reconnect communities to places or cultural practices stripped from them by settler-colonial forces through re-establishing a historical presence and narrative within history. In these situations, archaeology can be understood as an intervention aimed at repairing the harms of the past. These types of critical theory-based archaeological collaborations that seek to confront challenges faced by disadvantaged communities today have been heavily implemented in Indigenous (see Kali’uokapa’akai Collective, 2021; Thompson and Marek-Martinez, 2021; Antczak and Rodrı́guez Velásquez forthcoming; Smith et al., 2019) and African American contexts (Agbe-Davies, 2010; Minkoff et al., 2022; Jenkins, 2022; Gokee et al., 2022; Flewellen et al., 2022). While archaeology itself plays a greater or lesser role in actually creating change, the cultural cache offered by archaeology makes it an ideal tool to leverage greater community interest, engagement, and involvement. Education as Liberation In the United States context, one area where repair-focused social-justice-oriented critical archaeology has witnessed less penetration is working class archaeology. Although public archaeology has been used to establish the historical presence of working class and/or immigrant communities (Brooks, 2007; Burton and Farrell, 2022; Stottman, 2022; Massheder-Rigby, 2022), to prevent the destruction of sites related to historical working class communities (Brighton, 2011; Postgate, 2024), to promote class consciousness and labor rights (McGuire and Reckner, 2003; McGuire, 2014), and to address on-going forms of ethnic discrimination within working class contexts (Cools, forthcoming), public archaeology has not been used specifically to repair and correct the social, cultural, and economic factors that led to the disparate treatment and opportunities available to working class communities. This article documents one attempt to use archaeology to identify and challenge the structural barriers to equity and equal opportunity experienced by a working class community in northeastern Pennsylvania: the lack of access to class-based knowledge necessary for pursuing tertiary education in the United States. This article focuses on the post-industrial anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania, USA, to discuss the ways university-sponsored public archaeology programs have a unique opportunity to incorporate reparative and social justice frameworks into their engagement strategies by drawing on the social currency afforded by connections to higher education. Listening and responding to the needs of the communities enabled our community archaeology project to increasingly become (...truncated)