6th October 2010, 01:38 AM
(This post was last modified: 6th October 2010, 01:39 AM by BillyPilgrim.)
FedUp Wrote:If we all really cared we'd join the IFA or create a new body for ourselves and all stand up together. Surely we should be in alliance with construction unions not artists and actors! If all the actors get fired they can replace them with the Hollyoaks cast, if we all lose our jobs they'll probably just replace us with monkeys or dogs or a fantastical alliance of both!
Archaeology is, baring some sort of October miracle, facing a crisis. A new (to me) report on this subject (available for free), Archaeology and the Global Economic Crisis (Nathan Schlanger and Kenneth Aitchison eds.), contains an interesting paper by Anthony Sinclair on HE and archaeology:
“It has also been argued that the production of many more archaeology graduates than the actual number of employment places has had a damaging effect on the professional sector because of the surfeit of applicants for even the lowest paid jobs...[therefore] A reduced archaeological graduate output, resulting in a closer alignment between the number of archaeology graduates and places in the labour market for professional employment would appear to be no bad thing. Unfortunately this assumes that enough archaeology students will still seek a career in archaeology...If the overall number of archaeology graduates decreases, private contractors may no longer be able to entice new graduates into the profession”.
(p 42, 'The end of a golden age? The impending effects of the economic collapse on archaeology in higher education in the United Kingdom')
The emphasis is mine. What I was trying to get across in my first post and again in the above quote is that no area of archaeology is an island. Each sector - commercial, local government, museum, national body, education - is deeply interlinked and an unthinking, ideologically driven retrenchment in one hurts us all.
I have no real idea who Archaeologists for Global Justice are and I don’t agree with all their aims, but when facing a crisis of this size we have to work together. We should not as professionals expect to be applauded for what we do. We should as mature professionals be able to work together across sectors to provide a coherent consensus building argument to the public about who we are and what we do.
And yes, that should involve working with construction unions and artists.