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Half Pint: Roots and Future with Lizzy Craig-Atkins - Ep 34
634 Plays4 years ago
Archaeology and Ale is a monthly series of talks presented by Archaeology in the City, part of the University of Sheffield Archaeology Department’s outreach programme. Half Pint is a short interview-style format which we will be undertaking during the COVID-19 lockdown. In this first Half Pint interview, we welcome Dr Lizzy Craig-Atkins speaking about the Roots and Futures project.
Lizzy is a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield's Department of Archaeology. Her work focuses on human osteology and paleopathology with an interest in multidisciplinary approaches to past population structures, health, disease and lifestyle. Currently, Lizzy is involved in the Roots and Futures project which aims to involve members of the community in creating new understandings of Sheffield’s built and buried heritage. For more information on Lizzy and on Roots and Futures please follow the links below.
For more information about Archaeology in the City’s events and opportunities to get involved, please email [email protected] or visit our website at archinthecity.wordpress.com. You can also find us on Twitter (@archinthecity), Instagram (@archaeointhecity), or Facebook (@archinthecity)
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Transcript
Introduction to Archaeology and Ale Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:28
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Episode 34 of the Archaeology and Ale podcast and this segment of Halfpint. The podcast is brought to you by Archaeology in the City, the community outreach program from the University of Sheffield's Department of Archaeology.
Dr. Lizzie Craig Atkins: Research on Identities
00:00:43
Speaker
In this Halfpint, we welcome the University of Sheffield's own Dr. Lizzie Craig Atkins, telling us about the Roots and Futures Project.
00:01:01
Speaker
So I'm Lizzie Craig-Atkins. I am a senior lecturer in human osteology. I am a researcher with a specialism in the human skeleton and in funerary archaeology. And I'm particularly interested in studying sort of intersection between biological and social identities for the last about a thousand years of history in England.
Roots and Futures: Heritage Exploration
00:01:22
Speaker
Tell us about the Roots and Futures project, which you've been working on recently.
00:01:26
Speaker
So the Written Futures project was designed to be a co-constructed collaborative project working between the University of Sheffield and a series of partners in the city of Sheffield to explore heritage. So really the inspiration for the project was to try and
00:01:43
Speaker
create a kind of co-produced project. That is a project that involved external partners and ourselves, various organizations from the very beginning during the development of the project, during the identification of its aims and during the delivery of the project, but also at the end to kind of learn a little bit about what we can get from studying heritage in this way.
00:02:04
Speaker
So on one side, what we were looking to do is kind of test co-production methodologies to see whether we could work truly collaboratively with a range of different organizations and what benefits that might create for a public facing heritage project.
00:02:19
Speaker
But on the other side, we also wanted to start to talk about new communities in Sheffield, about heritage. We wanted to talk with those
Community Engagement and Funding
00:02:27
Speaker
communities about what interested them, about the history and the built environment and the archaeological signatures within the areas that they lived.
00:02:36
Speaker
So we could understand a little bit more about what community interest in the heritage in Sheffield would be and therefore take that forward to try and frame what we do in the future, research projects, further collaborative activity around community need and around community interest. The Recent Futures Project at the moment is actually funded by the University of Sheffield's Knowledge Exchange team. So the Knowledge Exchange team in our faculty are really active in encouraging and supporting
00:03:04
Speaker
staff and students to do research that engages with communities outside the halls of the university. They very kindly supported this project as part of a preliminary investigation into ways that we might do more community-engaged heritage work at Sheffield. What was it that drew you to participate in this project?
00:03:27
Speaker
One of the things that really kind of drew me towards this project was the opportunity, first of all, to work with a series of community organisations. So the Roots and Futures Project is a collaboration between the University of Sheffield, but also two community groups in North Sheffield. Zest, who are a community group representing people in Netherthorpe and Upperthorpe, and also the Callum Island and Nipsend Community Association, who represent people in the slightly northern area of Sheffield,
00:03:52
Speaker
which is around the Kellam Island area. So having not worked with community groups before, I thought it was a really nice opportunity to kind of embed some of my research and think a little bit more about how I could work in the future collaboratively with communities outside the university.
00:04:11
Speaker
The other thing that was really important for me about the project was the community engagement element, the getting archaeology out there to communities that are perhaps underrepresented within your traditional archaeological audience. And in Sheffield, we have a very diverse community. We have people who've come from all areas of the world, people who speak all different languages from all sorts of religious backgrounds.
00:04:30
Speaker
and I was really interested in
Partnerships and Digital Transition
00:04:32
Speaker
seeing whether we could explore some of the broader elements of heritage with those communities so that information could be fed back into the research that we do within the university to make our research more equitable and more representative of the interests of the communities we have in the city.
00:04:49
Speaker
Tell us more about the project's partners. Does working with people outside of the university environment give the project a unique look at archaeology and heritage? Yeah. So in addition to community partners, the project also has Kellam Island Museum as a partner. That's really important for us because Kellam Island Museum is obviously a heritage institution that is within the geographic area of the project. So it kind of represents all that accumulated understanding and knowledge and interest.
00:05:18
Speaker
in the heritage of this part of Northern Sheffield. The Museum are brilliant at the moment, we're talking to them about trying to put together an exhibition, really challenging given the fact that they've been closed because of COVID-19 for several months now, but they've been really supportive and really collaborative in ways of trying to find new routes for sharing the outcomes of the Roots and Futures project with communities and kind of branching it out even further to get to a wider audience of people.
00:05:47
Speaker
The other collaborator of the project is ECUS, Environmental Consultancy. ECUS have been the technical brains behind delivering the project app. So when we started this project, the idea was that we would employ a series of research assistants who helped deliver a whole variety of different aspects of what was going to be an in-person face-to-face series of workshops with community members.
00:06:11
Speaker
So we were just about to start the project in spring this year when the Covid crisis began. And just as we embarked on sort of planning for these in-person workshops which would bring community members together with community facilitators that would allow us to talk through and explore all sorts of interests people might have had in the realm of heritage, we realised we weren't going to be able to talk to anyone in person at all or indeed go anywhere.
00:06:39
Speaker
So this is where Ecus became a really important partner for the project, because our collaborator there, Courtney Craig and Turley, is an expert in all sorts of forms of digital heritage, and she helped us create the Roots and Futures app.
00:06:54
Speaker
The app is an SV story map app, as we produce the story map facility, which is freely available to anyone to use. It has some kind of more sophisticated content behind a payroll the university has an account, so we're able to kind of
00:07:09
Speaker
get to all those good resources. But Courtney really designed, developed and populated that app for us to enable us to create a resource that we could share with communities despite the fact we weren't actually able to meet them in person. How
Community Engagement Success During COVID-19
00:07:25
Speaker
did the idea for an app come about?
00:07:28
Speaker
The app was entirely a response to the COVID-19 situation. One of the strengths of this project and one of the areas of this project we had built in for the beginning was that the co-production would not only include the partners, it would include community members. And the model we had for doing that was via a series of in-person workshops. We wanted to do this face-to-face with focus groups, with community groups.
00:07:54
Speaker
it's interesting that we didn't end up doing any of that and certainly the app was at the time we kind of came up with it really a very sort of kind of we have to do something what can we do instead type response but on reflection I think we felt that the app has been incredibly successful huge amount of engagement with the communities that we wanted to reach we've been able to reach an awful lot more people
00:08:21
Speaker
We've also been able to have people interacting directly with the app in a model that's very similar to what we had when we were thinking about doing in-person workshops. The app isn't just a series of historical and archaeological pieces of information that people can access. It has a series of walking routes you can explore.
00:08:42
Speaker
Participants can actually upload their own information and share their own stories of local heritage. They can share their own photos. So the app really isn't ever growing, ever changing community project that has contributions from
00:08:58
Speaker
ourselves, from our collaborators and from the public. So, you know, in many ways we've been able to stay very true to the initial aims of the project, this co-productive kind of context, using a digital platform rather than an in-person workshop format. During the lockdown, did you find that the app was a useful substitute for meeting with members of the community in person?
00:09:22
Speaker
Obviously, the way we structured the app and the way we changed the aims of delivering the Roots and Futures project was very restricted by the situation we found ourselves in with COVID-19. I think one of the most important things was trying to find a way of still getting people to engage with heritage. And the whole point of this activity was about looking beyond your four walls, thinking about the area you live in and looking for that heritage, whatever it might be.
00:09:53
Speaker
So we were kind of torn between the situation that we knew that people may not be going out, they may not be able to move around as normal, but also there was a benefit to the idea that there was a lot of talk and a lot of emphasis on exercise, and people were exercising a lot more by walking around in their local areas than perhaps they would normally have been.
00:10:15
Speaker
So, you know, that was a real strength to kind of be able to use the app because we could share it with people as a possible way of getting them out and about, give people a reason to kind of explore their local area. And also, I think more people were actually walking around their local areas than necessarily would be at any time. So I wonder whether actually that kind of the combined impetus to
00:10:42
Speaker
be cautious and stay at home and not move beyond your local area with the desire still to get out and about a little bit but not really have many options about what you could do for exercise other than walk around your local area. Might have increased a really nice environment where the app could be useful to people, where people wanted to use it and engage with it and share their
00:11:02
Speaker
their new observations in their local area. I think people find that as they move around on kind of their daily mandated walk as it was back then, seeing new things, they were noticing new aspects of their local environment and local area. So what's next for the Roots and Futures Project?
00:11:20
Speaker
So the app is still live, it's still running and we still hope that people will continue to use it and contribute
Reflection and Future Plans
00:11:25
Speaker
to it. We are taking part in the Festival of Archaeology, which at the time of speaking now will be next week. We are also keen to be a bit reflective now on the project. So as the app has now been up and running for a few months, we've got to the stage of the project where we look back and reflect on its effectiveness, its success and learn for the future. And I think
00:11:49
Speaker
There were lots of reflective aims at the beginning of this project, all about trying to understand how the co-productive mechanism would work with this particular group of organisations, about learning about the heritage interests of the communities that we were engaging with. So really kind of one of the most important next stages is reflective. It's kind of building upon what we've learned from this project and thinking about ways that we might expand, develop and sort of reframe
00:12:18
Speaker
some of the work we might do looking at the heritage and shapefield to reflect community interests as best we can. The other aspect of what comes next hopefully will be some sort of exhibition in collaboration with Kellam Island Museum.
00:12:35
Speaker
This is all going to be very much dependent on future lockdowns and the extent to which museums can and can't open, but we're really keen, and Keller Milo Museum are really keen as well, to try and reflect this project in some sort of more permanent exhibition over a few months in the in the autumn and winter, so that people attending the museum can not only get a nice insight into
00:12:59
Speaker
a brilliant range of objects and heritage that the museum has on display, but also a little bit of sense about what the Roots & Futures project and its app has contributed to a community-based knowledge of heritage in the area. Going
App Contributions and Heritage Trails
00:13:12
Speaker
back to the app for a moment, what sorts of things do you find people are contributing?
00:13:17
Speaker
So people are adding a whole range of different things to the app and I think it's really reflective of how different people engage and how their interests have peaked in all sorts of different ways by the historic environment around them. We've got lots of contributions from people who have old photographs, perhaps old family photographs, but also old photographs that relate to their schools, their
00:13:44
Speaker
where they live, their community groups. So lots of photos are being uploaded. We also have people who are sharing experiential stories of growing up or living in Northern Sheffield. So, you know, stories about their remembrances of buildings and places that are no longer there. So sort of oral archive almost that mirrors the archaeological record we have.
00:14:10
Speaker
of this area too. People are also sharing more modern things as well and it's really interesting to see how people perceive their heritage not necessarily in sort of archaeological and historical terms, it's about the buildings that are around them that mean things to them.
00:14:25
Speaker
So for example, someone has uploaded a photograph of a piece of Pima Key artwork that there is on a wall in the area and someone's added the yellow art studios. There's a really eclectic range of things. And I think that's exactly what we wanted because we wanted this app perhaps to force us as archaeologists, as people who study the historic environment, to think beyond perhaps some of the scholarly barriers and framework we're used to.
00:14:54
Speaker
and try more to think about what the general public out there are really interested in and really want to know more about. Could you very quickly tell us how to use and engage with the app in case any of our Sheffield-based listeners want to contribute to the project?
00:15:11
Speaker
So the Roots and Features app is a web app. You don't need to download anything. You can just go onto it through your browser on any kind of mobile device. And when we were designing it, what we really wanted to do was give people some materials, something to use as they were walking through the northern Sheffield area to highlight and create a trail of some of the historic buildings, some of the archaeological sites that are in the area.
00:15:38
Speaker
So initially what we did was we populated the app with what we call the historic buildings trail that has a series of points throughout the area indicating some of the most significant historic buildings in the area which you could go and visit.
00:15:55
Speaker
But a lot of the heritage of the area is hidden away, it's beneath your feet, it's the archaeological work that has been done and reported on but you wouldn't necessarily know was there if you were just taking a stroll through that particular part of the city. So we created a second app to really reflect a lot of the archaeological work that's gone on in this part of the city and to show people wandering around that area what there actually is there and what's hidden away
00:16:19
Speaker
in terms of the heritage under those layers of more modern building and construction. But the key part of the app really is the Your Sheffield map. This is the area where we populate a map with all the photographs and all the stories that people have shared with us as part of using the app and that's really growing all the time.
00:16:39
Speaker
Thank you
Closing and Further Engagement
00:16:40
Speaker
for listening to this archaeology and ale half pint. For more information about Lizzie or the roots and futures project, please visit the show notes, which accompany this episode. And for more information about our podcast, please visit our page on the archaeology podcast network. You can get in touch with us at archaeology in the city on Facebook, WordPress, Instagram, or Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. See you next time.
00:17:16
Speaker
you
00:17:27
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.