Analyze

In my experience working with archaeologists, I have observed numerous instances where these experts show exceptional dedication to address epistemic injustices that have persisted within the field since its inception. Archaeology has its origins in colonialism and has developed based on what archaeologists considered "impartial" investigations of marginalized communities. In practice, this meant that archaeologists, who were often seen as authorities on the past, crafted narratives based on their own interpretations, emphasizing objects they deemed relevant to their chosen stories. This way of doing archaeology created epistemic injustices that have perpetuated misconceptions and inaccurate narratives about the lives of communities, both in contemporary times and throughout history. Recognizing this problematic historical legacy, archaeologists have recently made significant efforts to integrate the voices and practices of marginalized communities into their work, often through participatory approaches in scientific research. While these endeavors have yielded positive outcomes, challenges persist because the way communities perceive and understand the world (ontologies and epistemologies) is significantly distinct from the way archaeologists, using their scientific methods and theories, perceive and understand the world. Even with the most robust collaborative efforts in place, this distinction persists and may result in the continuation of various epistemic injustices. One notable example is the practice of elevating scientific evidence, affording it greater importance, credibility, and authority, sometimes at the expense of lived experiences and oral histories. Procedural injustices also persist, partly due to the legal framework governing archaeological practices, which primarily aligns with scientific perspectives rather than community perspectives, benefiting the scientific community. For instance, current regulations in certain states in the US permit landowners to have unrestricted control over the archaeological materials excavated on their properties, irrespective of their historical or cultural connection to the original communities to whom these materials belong. Archaeologists have displayed determined efforts to address historical injustices, but there is still a substantial amount of work ahead. As they navigate challenges, some ask themselves a crucial question: Can the practice of archaeology as we know it withstand the profound transformation necessary to emerge as a truly equitable and inclusive discipline? 

Image Description: "My hand and some of the materials I encountered in the field."

Domingues, Amanda. 2023. "Archaelogy and "impartial" investigations of marginalized communities." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

Sabina Vaught’s Compulsory challenges conventional understandings of state schooling through an ethnographic exploration of the juvenile prison school system in the United States. Vaught examines the ways in which juvenile prison and prison school are shaped by legal and ideological forces working across multiple state apparatuses. Vaught depicts these forces vividly through her ethnographic focus on Lincoln prison school, a site serving “as a window onto the massive institutional practices of juvenile schooling, knowledge production, and incarceration in the United States” (19). Her ethnography maps the network of relations converging through this site—between prisoners, teachers, state officials and mothers. In doing so, her ethnography captures an illustrative account of the institutional assemblages at work in constituting the state through material and ideological practices of dispossession and education of young Black men. She demonstrates the ways in which the state disproportionally displaces young Black men from home and subjects them to abuse, captivity, and forced submission through its educational apparatus.

 In her approach, Vaught highlights distinct spaces of interest: inside and outside the juvenile prison school system. She works with these designations to map institutional powers across different spaces, arguing that “Inside and Outside are places just as Seattle and Canada are proper nouns with distinct features, bounded space, governing rules, sociocultural symbology, and so on” (12). In mapping these spaces, Vaught is also attentive to who is present and who is absent, both discursively and materially. Absences are recognized as shaping the field in which Vaught is working—for instance, her ethnographic focus on young men in prison schools is largely an outcome of institutional practices of hiding young black women from view. In the logic of prison administrators, “girls were too vulnerable to be exposed to research” (17)—despite paradoxically deemed “dangerous” in justifying their captivity.

Vaught’s attention to absence is also explicit in her examination of removal, as a practice aimed at disrupting the private spheres of people of color through prisons and schools. Removal entails the physical relocation of students from their homes to schools, where “they are subject to meaningless or hostile captive educational performances” (321). Removal, as Vaught demonstrates, is essential to the continuous construction of the US as a White, heteropatriarchal nation.

More specifically, removal disables the possibility of a Black private sphere by disrupting kinship relations between young Black men and their families and making young Black men into prisoners. Removal acts as an assault “on Black women as custodians of the house of resistance, on Black boys as figments of White criminal imaginations who antithetically define White male innocence and citizenship, and on Black girls as both hyperaggressive and broken ghost victims” (321). The state works to supplant other social and family relations with carceral kinship relations, which normalize and legitimize the removal process. This process is further reinforced with the psychological manipulation of young men through state-imposed “treatment,” which corrodes their sense of free will and promotes feelings of internal, individual culpability for their exclusion from citizenship.

Vaught argues that this disruption of Black private spheres is significant because these are important spaces of resistance, in which counter publics are formed. In the United States, “the public” is leveraged as a tool of white supremacist control in limiting the power of some. Rights themselves are exclusive and private—limited to those possessing property, a condition of whiteness dependent on the exclusion of people of Color. Dispossession and education are practices that maintain and rationalize this exclusivity, as young Black men are denied the possibilities of citizenship. These practices serve to protect the interests of the White state, to which the potential emergence of private Black citizens (and their potential publics) act as threats: “White freedom, will, and fitness for self-governance exist only through the ideological and structural denial of those very things in Black people” (322).

In her attention to the interrelations between the white supremacist state, prison schooling, and critical scholarship, Vaught offers direction for activists and scholars invested in social justice and education—particularly in her critique of the school-to-prison pipeline, which draws attention to the limitations of reform. As an apparatus of the state, schools are meant to function as prison pipelines. Scholars and activists applying the prison-to-pipeline logic in advocating for education reform overlook this essential fact and “unintentionally confirm the principal, most damaging misconception of school: that it is good” (37). Vaught’s Compulsory supports and gives life to alternative theoretical approaches focused on the racist organization of schools in relation to prisons. In this, Vaught exemplifies her approach to theory as stewardship: theory is “a stewardship of a kinship network of meaning. It is not just an abstraction we take up and give life to page by page but rather a living force that in some ways takes us up” (41). Ultimately, Vaught’s theoretical stewardship offers meaningful direction for scholars and activists: “State schooling … is the beating heart of a supremacist state. … To take on the heart of the state requires further mapping its reaches” (323).

Ernesto Yerena Montejano, currently a Boyle Heights resident and originally from Imperial County, and his team of fellow artists Arlene Mejorado and Ayerim Leon — complete with friends and families" painted the mura.

It belongs to the Imperial Valley, but was one of 14 California commissions art projects as part of a collaboration between the Governor's Office, CA Dept of Public Health and The Center at Sierra Health Foundation. The commissioning program aimed to raise awareness about Covid19 within the State's hardest hit areas. Each an governmental agency stakeholder in the project along with curators who selected the artist for this mural.

The building's owner, which appears to be a someone poised to sell it soon is also a stakeholder and most importantly, local resident are active stakeholders as they began adding names of family members who died because of Covid on the western corner of the mural unprompted and without explicit instruction or permission.

The mural is located at 739 N. Imperial Avenue in El Centro. It is precariously positioned because although the current owner of the building has promised to protect it for the next 6 months (per Jun 10, 2021), the next owner of the building may cover over the mural. The mural was completed over 1 week by 5+ painters under the direction of  the artist Ernesto Yerena Montejano on May 30, 2021.

It brings together community members to commorate the toll Covid 19 has taken on the community. It provides a public service message to continue masking and thereby taking care of the community. And it adds an element of beauty and artfulness to what was a run-down building exterior

The mural covers the entire side of one building. The background is painted in purples, blue and yellow. One side of the wall is painted "Protege A Nuestra Comunidad!"|"Protect our Community!"

The centerpiece of the mural both figuratively and literally is a beautiful woman (anywhere beteween 20-40yo) in traditional dress with two long strands of brown braided hair holding a bouquet of colorful flowers tied together with a yellow sash. She is wear a face mask to back up the Covid-19 theme.

The flowers she holds is both a reference to the business--"Cynthia's Flower Connection" which has since moved as well as a tribute to the community and their deceased members who died of Covid. One indication is that community members began adding names to the side of the mural as a tribute to lost family members.

This mural is a public-works project commissioned by the State and agencies. It was created by an artist who has ties to the area. It is also meant to be a public health message, another way to reach local residents who have been "locked in"

“Right away we saw how powerful the mural was in bringing people together, especially after this year where we've been locked in and it's been hard to communicate with our community,” he said. Per David Varela, “People are slowly making their way to the mural and are able to mourn a little bit too,” Varela said. “It's really healthy to mourn and I think people are getting a chance to do that through the mural. I knew we'd not only get a beautiful mural, but a powerful message.”