February 9, 2016
Date/Time: Tuesday, February 9, 2016 - 13:00
For his work consulting and collaborating with local communities and descendent groups, and increasing diversity of representation within the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA), Professor Jun Sunseri was granted the Mark E. Mack Community Engagement Award by the Gender and Minority Affairs Committee (GMAC).
GMAC created the award to honor those individual researchers and research project teams who exhibit outstanding best practices in community collaboration, engagement, and outreach in their historical archaeology and heritage preservation work. How best to cultivate relationships between archaeologists and stakeholder communities has long been a point of much discussion. While many historical archaeologists often strive to work with one local community, others are faced with the more difficult task of collaborating with multiple stakeholders (i.e. local communities, local descendant communities, and non-local descendant communities, just to name a few). These relationships and the degree of collaboration relate directly to ethical concerns that are often not readily discussed or taught in many academic programs. Best practice suggests that stakeholder communities should be involved in nearly every phase of a project from planning to implementation, however facilitating collaboration and long-term relationships with stakeholder communities can be difficult.
GMAC believes that this award will generate positive discussions related to methodology and theoretical praxis surrounding community engagement both in CRM and academic research projects.
Congratulations, Professor Sunseri.