[Commlist] CFP activateCHAT conference

Please note that the deadline for submissions to participate in the 
activateCHAT conference (7-10 November 2024, hosted by University of 
Plymouth) has been extended to *15 June. *

We look forward to receiving individual and group proposals (300 words 
max + images, video, urls) that explore ACTIVATE and/or BUSY, through 
presentations, film, discussions, debates, posters, performances, and 
more. We are happy to discuss ideas for submissions. Please email 
(activateCHAT /at/ plymouth.ac.uk)

The Call for Submissions in full:
In 1946, Plymouth embarked on a utopian planning experiment that 
activated a city devasted by conflict. The development of the 
Abercrombie Plan was accompanied by the mass protest of 3000 Plymothians 
who marched through the city with beautiful banners demanding hospitals, 
housing, swimming pools, libraries, a university and ‘an end to tedium’. 
In 2023, the city witnessed the dead-of-night felling of trees – the 
timing activated by the end-of-financial-year expenditure deadline, with 
the act busily resisted by activist groups, mobilised as a council 
election issue, materialised as waves of Heras fencing decorated with 
children’s ribbons, chipboard, chainsaws, melancholy birds, and confused 
rats mourning their displacement, new design schemes, meeting minutes.

This year, CHAT comes to Plymouth and invites participants to respond to 
the themes ‘ACTIVATE’ (verb: to cause something to start) and ‘BUSY’ 
(adjective: having a great deal to do; keeping oneself occupied). How do 
creative archaeological practices inform understandings of ACTIVATE – 
activisms, actions, beginnings, enlivenings – and BUSY – late capitalist 
work culture, being occupied, cluttered, neoliberal wellness mantra? 
What are the contemporary and historical archaeological forms of 
ACTIVATE and BUSY – as both separate and intersecting themes – and how 
might this inform the way we (might) live now?

Contemporary and historical archaeological theory-and-practice have 
matured significantly since CHAT first emerged in 2003. The variety of 
fieldwork methods has grown, from filmmaking and sound-recording to 
walking as research to the careful documentation of ‘waste’, to socially 
engaged art in the public realm, to the critical-creative use of 
scanning and imaging technologies. These methods ACTIVATE new material 
and spatial insights . into the ongoing legacies of colonialism; into 
the operation of power structures; into practices that produce beauty 
and ‘otherwiseness’ out of idiosyncratic ‘capitalist cracks’; into how 
to stimulate conversations about the material workings of complicity, 
recuperation, subversion, divergence, and the liberation of humans and 
non-humans from extant racialised, gendered, class-based inequalities.  
Global politics is busily transformed by a handful of dangerous 
demagogues and billionaires! The planet is burning! While never have so 
many people had access to so many tools and to each other, we squander 
this in ‘busy-ness’. It is time to ACTIVATE! How can Contemporary and 
Historical Archaeological Theory and Practice ACTIVATE social, cultural, 
and political change? How might this generate understandings of what 
change means, what changes are needed and for whom? Who do people need 
to work with and through which media, materials, processes? Where do 
people need to be working? How do people build and/or strengthen working 
relationships across disciplines and across the academic, public, third 
and private sectors?

With activation comes busy-ness, however. Across all sectors people now 
experience the sensation of overwhelming busy-ness in ‘bullshit jobs’ 
(cf. David Graeber) – precarious, casualised, in service mainly to Excel 
and Outlook. In our special BUSY session at activateCHAT, we therefore 
invite contributions that look at how the material manifestations of 
(over)activating humans and other-than-humans, and how this helps to 
critically and practically interrogate both the glorification and 
vilification of busy-ness.

Across the whole conference, we ask: how do the themes of ACTIVATE and 
BUSY intersect and rub up against each other over time? How might 
archaeology – in its most expansive terms – generate understandings of 
what keeps us too ‘busy’ to enact the social, cultural, and political 
changes we want to manifest? How does it ask important questions about 
who this ‘us’ includes and excludes? What are the material 
manifestations of ‘busy’ and of the resistance to ‘busy’? As academics, 
artists, heritage practitioners, how do we account for our own roles in 
creating the BUSY structures that we BUSILY study? How have others 
responded non-violently, creatively, and inclusively to increased demand 
to ‘keep busy’ and what are the archaeological traces of that? How have 
people and collectives avoided making their ‘going slow’ becoming 
someone else’s being busy?

We welcome submissions in any media or form – including creative 
practice – that exemplify the application of Contemporary and/or 
Historical Archaeological Theory and/or practice (‘archaeological’, in 
the very broadest definition) in the real world, for real change. 
Submissions are especially welcomed from those whose work tackles or 
challenges the taken-for-granted, received wisdom, populism, identity 
wars, capitalism, exploitation, persecution, and divisiveness. While the 
language, aesthetics and actions of liberation, disruption, freedom, 
non-conformism, anti-racism, climate justice, community, and love are 
appropriated by late-stage capital and disfigured by the anxieties of 
the pyrocene and its volatile political responses, none the less, we 
invite all of you who situate yourselves in those forms to bring your 
ideas, your methods, your demonstrations, explorations, to share at 
activateCHAT, University of Plymouth.


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