Interdisciplinarity as solidarity: Perspectives from archaeology

James L. Flexner and Catherine J. Frieman

Introduction: Malcontented communities

The corporate university model is a failure … It’s time to reimagine universities as essential, democratic places which exist to serve the public good and which are accountable to staff and students, not executive management.¹

Twenty-first century academia increasingly resembles a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’. Individual scholars constantly fight for positions, research funding and media attention while their universities fixate on rankings, rewards or recognition that can be lorded over peer institutions. Indeed, even within the same institution, schools or faculties can behave like rival factions in a gang,² each competing with the others to gain prestige, advantage and often funding by playing the game they think the generously remunerated vice-chancellor and their underlings want them to play. Senator Mehreen Faruqi’s recent commentary, quoted above, was provoked by recent events and encapsulates a widely shared experience of the neoliberal university. The corporate imperative in contemporary universities entwines with a managerial commitment to a growth-above-all-things mindset. Outwardly, academia signals its virtue by fretting over climate change and equity issues. Internally, university managers are obsessed with continuous and apparently boundless growth as the divide between academic haves and have nots becomes wider and starker. In suggesting several, neither exhaustive nor exclusive, approaches that start to address these problems, we build our arguments upon existing critiques not only of universities,³ but also schooling⁴ and society more generally.⁵

To borrow a term from ecological economics and political ecology, a ‘degrowth’ corrective to the institutional mindset is needed to make sure we can all live within planetary as well as institutional limitations.⁶ Put simply, endless growth has become neither sustainable nor desirable in the twenty-first century. We have an environmental, political, social and economic responsibility to rein in the highly unequal benefits (for a select few) and costs (to the rest of us) of global capitalist growth, slowing and eventually reversing these trajectories to create a world that is liveable, safe, just and enjoyable for all. Degrowth is about fundamentally rearranging political, economic, and social relationships around an ethics of commons, conviviality and care, including within academic institutions. Critically, degrowth replaces an institutional and societal tendency towards austerity with economic and social arrangements involving abundance, but an abundance that is not concentrated in the hands of sociopolitical elites.⁷ As Bataille noted in La Part Maudite, all societies have some kind of excess energy that must be sacrificed or spent (dépensé) in some way.⁸ Societies can choose to use the excess for communal, convivial experiences open to all, or they can do as we currently do, which is to direct the energy to unsustainable, unequal, inhuman, atomised, individualised consumption.⁹

The larger degrowth project can include the work we do within our specific academic disciplines.¹⁰ However, we do not see a degrowth transition as simple or immediate, even if it were solely attempted within academic settings. In fact, the current system actively resists any such transformation. Before we can imagine any major changes to society, we must name capitalism as the destructive force it is and work towards dismantling it at the same time that everyone has to find ways to live within a financial reality and political system that supports it until things can change radically for the better.¹¹ Critique is not enough. We also need to explore alternatives that bring potential futures into being in large and small ways, within the realms of everyday practice. While recognising the serious limitations set by our bourgeois professional setting, we still believe in academia as one of those spaces with some latitude for experimentation with different social and political arrangements in and beyond the classroom.¹²

While we start from a hopeful perspective, we simultaneously want to acknowledge that the results of current academic obsessions with competition, prestige, metrics and rank are catastrophic. At the individual level, the constant struggle for stable employment, and the continuous surveillance and measurement of academic performance, even among those who obtain the vaunted tenured positions, has created a situation of spiralling mental illness and ongoing economic precarity for far too many.¹³ One symptom is the constant low-rolling acrimony between a cohort of ‘successful’ academics who believe that, in finding a more-or-less permanent academic perch and regular research funding, they have triumphed at a game of skill, and those faced with the reality that we are all effectively playing a game of chance. The annual addition of newly minted PhDs to a constantly shrinking job market simply exacerbates this tension. While some remain able to stack the odds in their favour, most of us recognise that there are simply too many talented, capable people clamouring for a small number of tenured academic positions that has not demonstrably grown since the 1970s.¹⁴ One result of this situation has been the increasing casualisation of academia. Rather than using the excess of talent to bolster and expand higher education and research, universities instead proliferate short-term contracts with minimal job security, stability or opportunity for advancement as a cost-cutting exercise. Universities continue to do this seemingly without concern for the ways casualisation harms individual career pathways, collective labour relations and public perception of academic institutions.¹⁵ Even among the lucky few in continuing roles, the chance of being able to pursue research to the level we would want is diminished by an ever-shrinking pool of grant and fellowship funding and continuously growing managerial and administrative demands.

The deterioration of labour relations in academia is represented by apparently never-ending corporate bargaining and accompanying industrial disputes stemming from an internalised capitalist mindset among the managerial class that equates profitability (in nominally non-profit institutions) with success. The situation has been made worse by ongoing cuts to public funding of higher education, which have led institutions to continuously seek higher student numbers, particularly from overseas, to maintain growth.¹⁶ Large disciplines that attract high student numbers, such as economics (ironically, a discipline that is largely about internalising and entrenching capitalist principles), are assumed to be successful because they bring in money. Meanwhile administrators question the value of smaller, more specialised fields, such as classics or religious studies, even when those disciplines produce graduates skilled in essential technical knowledge and services that offer a social benefit (we discuss this in relation to archaeology below). Ham-fisted attempts by the previous Australian government to funnel more students towards STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines by manipulating student fees nationally (also being examined as part of the current higher education review) have demonstrably not changed demand for HASS (humanities, arts and social science) degrees, something we predicted when the so-called Job-Ready package was introduced.¹⁷ Rather, the reforms simply saddle individual students with higher debt, and reduce diversity by making humanities disciplines inaccessible for people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Connell offers a salient critique of the current state of tertiary education, highlighting the contrasting values of collaborative, horizontal knowledge formation processes and the increasingly hierarchical structures of universities developed in line with neoliberal market ideologies.¹⁸ In the current academic realm, we are set at each other’s throats along too many axes and expected to treat the internal competition as laudatory. Solutions to these problems are extremely unlikely to come from government or managerial interference. Instead, what is needed is a sea change in day-to-day academic life, in which we replace relentless individual striving with a focus on collective action and collegial solutions to academic problems.

STEM and HASS: An arbitrary division

The ongoing debate about prioritising STEM over HASS remains salient in discussions of Australian academia, despite institutional attempts to span these divides.¹⁹ HASS v. STEM is not necessarily a new way of dividing up the totality of human knowledge,²⁰ but one clearly inflamed by two decades of Australian government policy tilting the tables in favour of degrees and research that produce discoveries that can be monetised and workers with narrow technical skills.²¹ Government policy, the priorities of external as well as internal research funding (to add another current example, HASS disciplines had the lowest success rate in the 2023 round of Australian Research Council Future Fellowships)²² and public reporting of research via the media project the misguided idea that the truly important discoveries of our times will come from STEM, while HASS research consists of frivolities that will dwindle into irrelevance. Scientific advances can have worryingly dystopian implications that need to be tempered by humanities knowledge, from genetics to artificial intelligence.²³ But, more importantly, the humanities themselves are critical to human and more-than-human futures regardless of affiliation with the sciences.²⁴ The artificial and contrived competition between the disciplines has added an element of mutual suspicion that harms knowledge production. This is doubly ironic because we live in a society where both science and the humanities (indeed knowledge and expertise in general) are under threat.

A related arbitrary and artificial distinction can be found in the line drawn between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research. While the former historically held a more prestigious position in the academy, the hierarchy between these two has been recently inverted by internal and external imperatives to engage with the public, do work with impact and produce deliverables that industry can turn into profit. The pure/applied research division, like the definition of ‘impact’, is fundamentally nebulous: pure research has often resulted in unexpected technical or economic developments, and applied research contributes directly to knowledge formation processes.²⁵ Nor is this a new debate. The founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University demonstrated over 80 years ago that it is impossible to predict how ‘useful’ any advances in knowledge might become, and what disciplines they are likely to come from. Therefore, universities have an imperative to support all pursuits of new knowledge across the sciences as well as the humanities.²⁶

Connell describes research as ‘a social process, a collective undertaking that produces, not just individual sparks of genius, but an expanding, many-sided, and above all shared body of knowledge’.²⁷ In a healthy knowledge ecosystem, the distinctions that structure our disciplines should be built around complementarity, exchange and mutual support. Clearly the way forward is to work together rather than digging into separate bunkers while the situation around us continues to deteriorate. To provide some concrete examples of interdisciplinary knowledge building as solidarity, we draw on our experiences in Australian, American and British institutions, in addition to being archaeologists who work directly in research teams that cross the boundaries between art and science, to suggest ways to radically rearrange the nature of humanities research and academia more broadly. Our research also involves collaboration between different universities as well as other organisations, from museums to genetics laboratories to heritage consultancies and beyond. While there is much to be critical of and indeed worried about in contemporary academia, including within archaeology, we argue that it is imperative to imagine a more collective and mutual aid–oriented environment for current and incoming generations of scholars.²⁸ We see this as essential to the future not only of the humanities, but also of universities themselves. It is only through collective effort that we can reform institutions to be more equitable, kind, convivial and, indeed, excellent (to turn one piece of corporate euphemism against itself) as places to work and places to think.²⁹

Interdisciplinary, practice-based experiences in archaeology

Archaeology would not necessarily be the first discipline of choice in which to prefigure anti-hierarchical collaboration in the humanities. Nor would we suggest it provides a ‘model’ for other disciplines to follow, whether HASS- or STEM-leaning. Rather, we offer our own disciplinary and professional experiences to examine where the more egalitarian potential lies, how it might be realised and what tensions remain in the field. As an initial problem stemming from disciplinary history, one foundational model for large-scale archaeological surveys and excavations was the military expedition.³⁰ The project director served as a sort of ersatz ‘general’ overseeing lesser officers who were responsible for supervising the trenches and finds shed, who in turn oversaw numerous grunts (usually underpaid local labourers) doing the actual manual work of excavating deposits and scrubbing pottery. While some of our colleagues may hold onto that delusion, the field of archaeology has been radically transformed since the middle of the twentieth century, not least because of the efforts of feminist and Indigenous archaeologists.³¹ Expertise has been decentred from the director’s field notes, and rightly replaced in the excavator’s hands, be they those of a specialist, a student or a paid labourer.³²

In part, a transition to more egalitarian approaches within archaeological practice stems from the nature of knowledge within the discipline. Archaeology is by necessity the study of fragmented and incomplete evidence from the ancient as well as the more recent past. We deal in ambiguities, probabilities, hunches and half-truths, as well as facts and data.³³ It is, therefore, a field ripe for argument and interpretation, all the way from the two field technicians arguing about whether the dark stain in the soil represents a posthole or a tree root, to the two professors arguing about the best theoretical model for a meta-analysis of thousands of sites. Archaeologists also tend to work in teams where expertise varies. We rely on highly specialised scientific analysis to provide fundamental information about the sites we study. From geomorphology to genetics to numeric dating techniques, complex and specialised analyses are increasingly crucial to our understanding of basic archaeological questions including ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘who’. While most archaeologists can probably explain how and why the radiocarbon method works to provide a numeric date range for a given site, layer or object at a basic level, only a handful of specialists can take a burned twig that might be thousands of years old and launch its atoms through a particle accelerator to obtain a reliable, high-precision date.

Knowledge of the specific contexts and materials of our discipline can be highly individualised. On an excavation, expertise about a particular trench or set of contexts—the layers of soil representing sequences of human activities at the site at some point in the past—rests with the excavators who directly observe and document them.³⁴ At best, a project director can only take an overview approach to what is happening around the site, which means they rely on this kind of hyper-localised knowledge to understand the contexts and materials emerging around them. Likewise, the person who analysed a specific assemblage of bones, stone tools or potsherds develops an intimate relationship with those objects. This expertise constitutes an equally localised reordering of hierarchy, such that a professor with decades of experience might come to ask a student about their unique knowledge concerning a particular box of old things.

Archaeological fieldwork is another setting that creates challenges to established hierarchies and patterns of disciplinary difference. The notion of research in the field is perceived as a representative trait in the discipline, with people in and out of archaeology taking the term fieldwork to mean digging.³⁵ Excavations are invariably carried out by teams of some kind, usually including academics from multiple institutions as well as students, community members and other specialists, all of whom work together to achieve a given season’s fieldwork goals. Although often romanticised as an egalitarian space, the relaxation of norms characteristic of fieldwork can be harmful. Field expeditions in archaeology, palaeontology and related disciplines are known to be rife with all kinds of problems, including racism, sexism, ableism, substance abuse and harassment.³⁶ Nonetheless, we need not accept these as inevitable or irredeemable flaws in the field. Instead, we should look to examples of Indigenous-led, collaborative and feminist approaches to fieldwork as models of good practice to be emulated and expanded upon.³⁷

More broadly, archaeology by its nature is about the land and about ancestral things. As a result, it is a discipline of fascination in some contexts, sometimes contentious engagements with marginalised people in others, and sometimes both things at the same time. There is an extensive literature covering archaeologies described as Indigenous, postcolonial, activist, public and community that attempts to deal with this kind of interaction.³⁸ For the purposes of this paper, the point is that these kinds of relationships often require archaeologists to relinquish some of their authority, particularly within localised spaces where our academic expertise might be put to the side to defer to local chiefs, elders or knowledge-keepers.³⁹

Archaeologists often directly articulate with an industry that translates from academic study to commercial employment with little friction. Most of the archaeological work that happens globally takes place not in academic contexts, but under the generalised heading of ‘contract archaeology’, in which a developer or government institution hires one or more private professional archaeology companies to do legally mandated survey and excavation ahead of an activity that disturbs the environment, typically construction or mining.⁴⁰ Here, too, the boundary is permeable, as contractors often draw directly on academic expertise to complete their work, and many academics work across the university-contract divide to support their academic careers or make ends meet. In the US, the cultural resource management industry (as contract archaeology is called there) is set to grow by nearly US$2 billion in the next decade, with attendant demand for graduates, particularly those with advanced degrees.⁴¹ A similar pattern of growth and demand for qualified graduates is likely for places like Australia and Europe.

Rather than seeing this statistical prediction as a justification for runaway pursuit of profit, the high demand for cultural heritage experts should be leveraged towards reforms of the unequal and unsustainable elements of archaeology. There are well-documented patterns of worker exploitation, burnout, underpayment and unreasonable managerial demands, not to mention a ‘disaster capitalism’ approach to relationships with Indigenous people in commercial archaeology.⁴² It is beyond time for a fundamental rearrangement of archaeological practice to match current ethical principles and community expectations. An ideological commitment to equating profits and growth with success can be named as a root cause of these problems. Rather than thinking of how much money can be made, we should be asking how archaeology can provide a counter-mechanism to the mass destruction capitalism has caused and continues to cause across environment and society by contributing to the growth of public commons, convivial human experiences and greater care both for people and heritage.⁴³

In many places, including Australia, the perceived divide between ‘contract’ and ‘academic’ archaeology has produced another unfortunate and unnecessary rift. From the perspective of consulting or contract archaeologists, the academics are overly theoretical and impractical, spending most of their time in the classroom and library. Many academics see contract archaeology as a lesser pathway through the discipline, having internalised the ideological position, usually established during postgraduate study, that the highest career aspiration possible is a tenured position at a research university. In practice, this split is artificial, counterproductive and a product of a false sense of competition. In reality, archaeology needs a healthy industry to provide an economically feasible career path for graduates. As noted above, on the one hand, we want to work towards a reversal of capitalism’s patterns; on the other, we do not want to encourage our students towards a life of debt and permanent precarity. Meanwhile, industry needs strong academic archaeology departments to produce new generations of practitioners with the most current knowledge in their intellectual toolkits. Many academics in practice do have productive working relationships with consultants who themselves are prominent researchers in the field.⁴⁴ Nor is it enough to say the contract archaeologists are the data gatherers while the academics provide theory and big ideas.⁴⁵ In successful instances, partnerships between industry and academia create opportunities that would not otherwise exist to build pathbreaking knowledge by leveraging the resources of both institutional forms, the heritage consultancy and the academic department.⁴⁶

While incompletely realised, these kinds of arrangements set the stage for reconstructing a discipline that values collaboration, collegiality, conviviality and care.⁴⁷ Many of our most joyful professional experiences as archaeologists come from practice-based research and teaching that engages with students, other archaeology colleagues and colleagues from other disciplines across the field, laboratory, seminar hall and classroom. They are also among our most productive in the orthodox sense, as these interactions spur the next publications, theoretical innovations and further collaborative research.

And yet, our institutions—both tangible and abstract—seem arranged to militate against collaboration to the point that we, at times, cannot help but feel we are being discouraged from reaching out to do this generative work. The endless string of memoranda of understanding and multi-institution agreements that are necessary exoskeletons to our collaborations create friction in our interpersonal and inter-institutional relationships. We have both met, at various times, the subtle insinuation that bringing in a colleague from another university (let alone a collaborator without a university affiliation or one from another country!) to work on a top tier grant or publication is somehow an act of treason or a suspicious expenditure. Excessive, profit-oriented, anti-collegial managerialism can wear down the collaborative instinct while creating barriers to the free flow of knowledge.

Still, we carry on because the results are worth it. An appeal, then, to universities and to our colleagues: don’t buy into the Hobbesian mandate. No scholar is an island unto themself. All our knowledge—from history to literature to sociology to economics to chemistry to particle physics—emerges from our collective intellectual endeavours. This is particularly visible in disciplines like archaeology that require collaboration that spans HASS and STEM; that work across scholarly institutions with their different expertise, equipment and facilities; that connect to partners in industry, such as museums and heritage consultancies; and that are embedded in communities of various kinds. Rather than throwing up roadblocks, universities should be lowering the drawbridge to encourage these kinds of collaborations. A university is not contained within its walls but emergent from its relationships.

From monastery to craft workshop

The stereotypical architectonic arrangement of most HASS academic office spaces is a throwback to monastic traditions of individual self-reflection and pursuit of textualised knowledge.⁴⁸ Individual scholars, from postdocs to professors, sit behind closed doors pursuing the absolute boundaries of esoteric and specialised fields. While these kinds of quiet and contemplative spaces are necessary for the careful introspection that underlies knowledge creation, they should not be taken as a metaphor for the whole of the knowledge production ecosystem.

In the STEM disciplines (again, stereotypically), laboratories abound. Research teams spend their time together, discussing ideas in formal as well as informal engagements that result in a bubbly atmosphere of knowledge building within collective spaces.⁴⁹ Similar processes obviously happen across HASS disciplines as well, but, for some reason, form has not generally followed function. Thus, on many campuses, the default has been to decamp to the nearest cafe for the kind of discursive conviviality that drives new ideas forward.

With the periodic closure of many Australian university campuses during 2020–22, research basically moved to the home, exacerbating the fragmentation of knowledge and of relationships in academia. While some new opportunities emerged through the various online platforms to which scholars have all become accustomed, the pandemic probably reinforced for many the idea that we are on our own when it comes to surviving and thriving in academia. Certainly, the wave of department closures, change management plans and voluntary redundancies that took place, starting in 2020, did little to create a sense of solidarity among the academic community.⁵⁰

With COVID as a moment of rupture destabilising old patterns and habits, we argue that now is the time to renegotiate our space—real and conceptual—with a better future in mind. The collaborations and conviviality that spur work across the HASS fields must be promoted and the individualising tendencies reduced or relegated. Individual effort and expertise are valuable and necessary, and sole-authored works—from monographs to sculptures—are rightly celebrated. However, for far too long the emphasis on ‘lone genius’ theorists or public intellectuals in the humanities has set the trend for the rest of us to follow. A sustainable and joyful future in the humanities requires formal team-oriented collaborations as well as informal liaising, networking, conversing and knowledge-building activities.

Plenty of examples of successful collaborative interdisciplinary works, centres, labs or hubs involving humanities scholars exist across Australian universities.⁵¹ However, too many of these projects continue to privilege particular scholars and types of scholarship over others. Too often, academia reinforces established hierarchies by distinguishing the already distinguished via biased notions of established ‘track record’.⁵² Knowledge should be permeable, welcoming and open to expertise no matter the expert’s background. Depth of knowledge in specific disciplines and sub-specialties is important. So is lateral thinking. So is the value of outsider questions, both the ones that might be asked of our expertise, and the ones we might ask when we step outside of our disciplinary comfort zones. We need more shared social spaces, either conceptual or physical, in which to hammer out the kinds of ideas that matter for our times, from living through climate change and mass extinction⁵³ to community-led research,⁵⁴ degrowth scholarship⁵⁵ and questions of innovation and continuity⁵⁶ among many others. By being expansive in our definition of expert, we strike a balance between the individual efforts prized by much HASS scholarship and the collective work of knowledge creation writ large.

Making universities into radical spaces

Many humanities academics, and indeed many people outside of academia, love to believe the professoriate exists to express radical ideas and challenge the existing social order. Yet analysing the social structure of any university reveals a deeply conservative, starkly unequal and firmly entrenched hierarchy, with severely limited and circumscribed mechanisms for dissent or transformation.⁵⁷ The contradictions between what universities seem to say they want to do (be a force for good in the world) and what they do (pursue growth, rankings, prestige and the financial benefits that flow from these things) will never be resolved in a meaningful way from on high. Those of us in the humanities who tend to work in interdisciplinary teams, in partnership with other universities, spanning the HASS–STEM and academia–industry divides, should be leading the charge towards something different. As archaeologists who work in collaborative teams by default, we are aware of the ways that the individualised and antagonistic nature of academic careerism and institutional competition can frustrate, limit or even negate the best of intentions for collegiality.

Current arrangements of academic competitiveness and austerity are not only damaging to research, but also are based on flawed premises. Lack of funding for humanities as well as sciences is often asserted but rarely demonstrated by universities, aside from the well-known fact that the Australian government funds research at the lowest level of any OECD country.⁵⁸ Decisions to underfund research come not from an environment of baseline scarcity but result from the appalling and perversely unequal ways that economic resources are distributed under capitalism.

The HASS–STEM dispute we describe above is just one symptom of the manufactured internal and external competition of academia. There is great potential for a dépense that redistributes Australia’s immense wealth to benefit not only research and researchers but also society writ large. If the situation of mass academic precarity was invented, it can also be rejected and replaced with something better. There needs to be a renewal of the social contract in academia, and a re-evaluation of the broader social order. Transformation is unlikely to occur wholesale or overnight; however, like most things worth pursuing, we believe these kinds of changes merit the difficult conversations and hard work they will require.

We have provided some examples of interdisciplinary collaboration from within archaeology, with the hope that some of the concepts and structures can be adapted to other areas. As noted, we do not believe we come from a ‘model’ or ‘best’ discipline. We recognise many other possibilities within the beautiful diversity of academic and non-academic ways of knowing. Nonetheless, we think archaeology presents several keys to successful collaboration in the future of the humanities, including flexibility with disciplinary norms and boundaries; willingness to look outside of academia for partnerships; working in consensus-based teams with earned but not arbitrary authority; de-emphasising individual productivity and performance in favour of a more collaborative understanding of knowledge production; and reorienting our institutions towards an ethos that includes space for conviviality, care and radical experimentation with different ways of working together. Knowledge does not spring fully grown out of the minds of single individuals. It emerges through a slow process of study, discussion, experimentation, disagreement and cooperation. The university sector in Australia feels particularly parlous now, ready to topple into ruins with the slightest change in policy or priority. The scholars and students, whose knowledge and efforts built it up, feel the brunt of this precarity. Instead of building yet more buttresses for a collapsing edifice, maybe it is time to embrace the ruins and build something better in their place.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the hundreds of colleagues, students and community members we have worked with in various archaeological projects over the years, from Cornwall to Tasmania, and California to Tahiti. We would also like to thank Kylie Message-Jones for inviting us to contribute to this issue.

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1. 1 Senator Mehreen Faruqi, quoted in Henry Belot and Melissa Davey, ‘University of Sydney Urged to “Come Clean” on Payment to Company It Part-Owns with PwC’, Guardian, 30 July 2023, www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jul/30/university-of-sydney-urged-to-come-clean-on-payment-to-company-it-part-owns-with-pwc.

2. 2 A. Afonso, ‘How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang’, London School of Economics Impact (blog), 11 December 2013, blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how-academia-resembles-a-drug-gang/.

3. 3 Richard Hil, Richard, Kristen Lyons and Fern Thompsett, Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis: A University for the Common Good (London: Routledge, 2022).

4. 4 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Bloomsbury, 1970); Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (London: Calder & Boyars, 1971); bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (London: Routledge, 1994); bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (London: Routledge, 2003).

5. 5 Georges Bataille, La Parte Maudite (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins).

6. 6 Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis, eds, Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era (London: Routledge, 2015); Giorgos Kallis, Degrowth (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda, 2018); Daniel W. O’Neill, Andrew L. Fanning, William F. Lamb and Julia K. Steinberger, ‘A Good Life for All within Planetary Boundaries’, Nature Sustainability 1, no. 2 (2018): 88–95, doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0021-4.

7. 7 D’Alisa, Demaria and Kallis, Degrowth.

8. 8 Bataille, La Parte Maudite. See also Onofrio Romano, ‘Dépense’, in Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, ed. Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis (London: Routledge, 2015), 86–89.

9. 9 Marco Deriu, ‘Conviviality’, in Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, ed. Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis (London: Routledge, 2015), 79–82; Diego Andreucci and Terrence McDonough, ‘Capitalism’, in Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, ed. Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria and Giorgos Kallis (London: Routledge, 2015), 59–62.

10. 10 James L. Flexner, ‘Degrowth and a Sustainable Future for Archaeology’, Archaeological Dialogues 27, no. 2 (2020), 159–71, doi.org/10.1017/S1380203820000203; Nicolas Zorzin, ‘Is Archaeology Conceivable within the Degrowth Movement?’, Archaeological Dialogues 28, no. 1 (2021): 1–16, doi.org/10.1017/S1380203821000015.

11. 11 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Ropley: O Books, 2009).

12. 12 See also James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

13. 13 Teresa M. Evans, Lindsay Bira, Jazmin Beltran Gastelum, L. Todd Weiss and Nathan L. Vanderford, ‘Evidence for a Mental Health Crisis in Graduate Education’, Nature Biotechnology 36, no. 3 (2018): 282–4, doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4089; Danielle Docka-Filipek and Lindsey B. Stone, ‘Twice a “Housewife”: On Academic Precarity, “Hysterical” Women, Faculty Mental Health, and Service as Gendered Care Work for the “University Family” in Pandemic Times’, Gender, Work & Organization 28, no. 6 (2021): 2158–79, doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12723.

14. 14 Robert J. Speakman, Carla S. Hadden, Matthew H. Colvin, Justin Cramb, K. C. Jones, Travis W. Jones, Isabelle Lulewicz, Katharine G. Napora, Katherine L. Reinberger, Brandon T. Ritchison, Alexandra R. Edwards and Victor D. Thompson, ‘Market Share and Recent Hiring Trends in Anthropology Faculty Positions’, PLOS ONE 13, no. 9 (2018), doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202528; Diego A. Reinero, ‘The Path to Professorship by the Numbers and Why Mentorship Matters’, Nature Human Behaviour, 23 October 2019, socialsciences.nature.com/posts/55118-the-path-to-professorship-by-the-numbers-and-why-mentorship-matters.

15. 15 ‘“Appallingly Unethical”: Why Australian Universities Are at Breaking Point’, Guardian, 11 April 2023, www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/apr/10/appallingly-unethical-why-australian-universities-are-at-breaking-point.

16. 16 This pattern is one of many being addressed in a current review of higher education in Australia. See Department of Education, ‘Australian Universities Accord’, accessed 31 July 2022, www.education.gov.au/australian-universities-accord.

17. 17 C. F. Frieman and J. L. Flexner, ‘Submission 137’, Submissions: Higher Education Support Amendment (Job-Ready Graduates and Supporting Regional and Remote Students) Bill 2020, Australian Parliament, accessed 26 November 2023, www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Education_and_Employment/JobReadyGraduates/Submissions.

18. 18 Raewyn Connell, The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change (London: Zed Books, 2019).

19. 19 For example, Australian Council of Learned Academies, Annual Report 2022 (Canberra: ACOLA, 2022).

20. 20 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution: The Rede Lecture, 1959 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959).

21. 21 Lyn Carter, ‘Neoliberalism and Stem Education’, Journal for Activist Science and Technology Education 7, no. 1 (2016), jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/jaste/article/view/26825.

22. 22 Australian Research Council, ‘Selection Report: Future Fellowships for Funding Commencing in 2023’, Australian Government, accessed 26 November 2023, www.arc.gov.au/funding-research/funding-outcome/selection-outcome-reports/selection-report-future-fellowships-funding-commencing-2023.

23. 23 Catherine J. Frieman and Daniela Hofmann, ‘Present Pasts in the Archaeology of Genetics, Identity, and Migration in Europe: A Critical Essay’, World Archaeology 51, no. 4 (2019): 528–45, doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2019.1627907; Maui Hudson, Nanibaa’ A. Garrison, Rogena Sterling, Nadine R. Caron, Keolu Fox, Joseph Yracheta, Jane Anderson, Phil Wilcox, Laura Arbour, Alex Brown, Maile Taualii, Tahu Kukutai, Rodney Haring, Ben Te Aika, Gareth S. Baynam, Peter K. Dearden, David Chagné, Ripan S. Malhi, Ibrahim Garba, Nicki Tiffin, Deborah Bolnick, Matthew Stott, Anna K. Rolleston, Leah L. Ballantyne, Ray Lovett, Dominique David-Chavez, Andrew Martinez, Andrew Sporle, Maggie Walter, Jeff Reading and Stephanie Russo Carroll, ‘Rights, Interests and Expectations: Indigenous Perspectives on Unrestricted Access to Genomic Data’, Nature Reviews Genetics 21, no. 6 (2020): 377–84, doi.org/10.1038/s41576-020-0228-x; Catherine J. Frieman, ‘NFTs as Skeuomorphs: Weaponized Sameness and Fascist Utopias’, American Anthropologist 125, no. 1 (2023): 194–8, doi.org/10.1111/aman.13805; Jane E. Fountain, ‘The Moon, the Ghetto and Artificial Intelligence: Reducing Systemic Racism in Computational Algorithms’, Government Information Quarterly 39, no. 2 (2022), doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2021.101645.

24. 24 Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope (New York: Penguin Press, 2023).

25. 25 Brian Schmidt, ‘Research in Australia’s Universities Should Be Driven by Curiosity, Not Commerce’, Guardian, 25 October 2022, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/25/research-in-australias-universities-should-be-driven-by-curiosity-not-commerce.

26. 26 Abraham Flexner, ‘The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge’, in The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, ed. Abraham Flexner and R. Dijkgraaf (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017 [1939]), 49–87, doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvc77fxf.4.

27. 27 Connell, The Good University, 12.

28. 28 Mutual aid from Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: William Heinemann, 1902). See also William Caraher, ‘Slow Archaeology, Punk Archaeology, and the “Archaeology of Care”’, European Journal of Archaeology 22, no. 3 (2019): 372–85, doi.org/10.1017/eaa.2019.15.

29. 29 Flexner, ‘Degrowth and a Sustainable Future for Archaeology’.

30. 30 Christopher Evans, ‘Soldiering Archaeology: Pitt Rivers and “Militarism”’, Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 24, no. 4 (2014): 1–20, doi.org/10.5334/bha.244.

31. 31 Early feminist approaches include Margaret Wright Conkey and Joan M. Gero, eds, Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Hilary du Cros and Laurajane Smith, eds, Women in Archaeology: A Feminist Critique (Canberra: Department of Prehistory, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, 1993). Foundational writing in Indigenous approaches include Sonya Atalay, Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Claire Smith and Hans Martin Wobst, eds, Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2005).

32. 32 Daniel Eddisford and Colleen Morgan, ‘Single Context Archaeology as Anarchist Praxis’, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5, no. 2 (2019): 238–44, doi.org/10.1558/jca.33580; Mary Leighton, ‘Excavation Methodologies and Labour as Epistemic Concerns in the Practice of Archaeology. Comparing Examples from British and Andean Archaeology’, Archaeological Dialogues 22, no. 1 (2015): 65–88, doi.org/10.1017/S1380203815000100.

33. 33 Paul Graves-Brown, ‘Touching from a Distance: Alienation, Abjection, Estrangement and Archaeology’, Norwegian Archaeological Review 44, no. 2 (2011): 131–44, doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2011.629808; Tim Flohr Sørensen, ‘In Praise of Vagueness: Uncertainty, Ambiguity and Archaeological Methodology’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 23, no. 2 (2016): 741–63, doi.org/10.1007/s10816-015-9257-8.

34. 34 Eddisford and Morgan, ‘Single Context Archaeology as Anarchist Praxis’.

35. 35 Rosemary A. Joyce and Robert W. Preucel, ‘Writing the Field of Archaeology’, in The Languages of Archaeology, ed. Rosemary A. Joyce (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 18–38, doi.org/10.1002/9780470693520.ch2.

36. 36 Kathryn B. H. Clancy, Robin G. Nelson, Julienne N. Rutherford and Katie Hinde, ‘Survey of Academic Field Experiences (Safe): Trainees Report Harassment and Assault’, PLOS ONE 9, no. 7 (2014): e102172, doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102172; Erin L. Durban, ‘Anthropology and Ableism’, American Anthropologist 124, no. 1 (2022): 8–20, doi.org/10.1111/aman.13659; Maureen S. Meyers, Elizabeth T. Horton, Edmond A. Boudreaux, Stephen B. Carmody, Alice P. Wright and Victoria G. Dekle, ‘The Context and Consequences of Sexual Harassment in Southeastern Archaeology’, Advances in Archaeological Practice 6, no. 4 (2018): 275–87, doi.org/10.1017/aap.2018.23; Robert J. Muckle, ‘On Sexual Harassment and Abuse in Archaeology’, SAA Archaeological Record 14, no. 5 (2014): 32–33.

37. 37 For example, Sara L. Gonzalez, Ian Kretzler and Briece Edwards, ‘Imagining Indigenous and Archaeological Futures: Building Capacity with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde’, Archaeologies 14, no. 1 (2018): 85–114, doi.org/10.1007/s11759-018-9335-0; Amber M. VanDerwarker, Kaitlin M. Brown, Toni Gonzalez and Hugh Radde, ‘The UCSB Gender Equity Project: Taking Stock of Mentorship, Equity, and Harassment in California Archaeology through Qualitative Survey Data’, California Archaeology 10, no. 2 (2018): 131–58, doi.org/10.1080/1947461X.2018.1535791.

38. 38 For example, Sonya Atalay, Lee Rains Clauss, Randall H. McGuire and John R. Welch, eds, Transforming Archaeology: Activist Practices and Prospects (London: Routledge, 2016); Yvonne Marshall, ‘What Is Community Archaeology?’, World Archaeology 34, no. 2 (2002): 211–19, doi.org/10.1080/0043824022000007062; Gabriel Moshenska, Key Concepts in Public Archaeology (London: UCL Press, 2017).

39. 39 For example, James L. Flexner, ‘Who Steers the Canoe? Community-Led Field Archaeology in Vanuatu’, in Community-Led Research: Walking New Pathways Together, ed. Victoria Rawlings, James L. Flexner and Lynette Riley (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2021), 107–26.

40. 40 Crist Gnecco and Adriana Schmidt Dias, ‘On Contract Archaeology’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 19, no. 4 (2015): 687–98, doi.org/10.1007/s10761-015-0305-6.

41. 41 Jeffrey H. Altschul and Terry H. Klein, ‘Forecast for the US CRM Industry and Job Market, 2022–2031’, Advances in Archaeological Practice 10, no. 4 (2022): 355–70, doi.org/10.1017/aap.2022.18.

42. 42 Yannis Hamilakis, ‘Archaeology and the Logic of Capital: Pulling the Emergency Break’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 19, no. 4 (2015): 721–35, doi.org/10.1007/s10761-015-0307-4; Rich Hutchings and Marina La Salle, ‘Archaeology as Disaster Capitalism’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 19, no. 4 (2015): 699–720, doi.org/10.1007/s10761-015-0308-3; Nicolas Zorzin, ‘Dystopian Archaeologies: The Implementation of the Logic of Capital in Heritage Management’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 19, no. 4 (2015): 791–809, doi.org/10.1007/s10761-015-0315-4.

43. 43 Flexner, ‘Degrowth and a Sustainable Future for Archaeology’; Zorzin, ‘Is Archaeology Conceivable within the Degrowth Movement?’

44. 44 For example, see the papers collected in D. Rae Gould, Holly Herbster, Heather Law Pezzarossi and Stephen A. Mrozowski, eds, Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Collaboration: Discovering Histories That Have Futures (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020).

45. 45 Artur Ribeiro, ‘Archaeology Will Be Just Fine’, Archaeological Dialogues 23, no. 2 (2016): 146–51, doi.org/10.1017/S1380203816000180.

46. 46 Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, Anne Spice, Mike Ridsdale and John R. Welch, ‘Liberating Trails and Travel Routes in Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en Territories from the Tyrannies of Heritage Resource Management Regimes’, American Anthropologist 125, no. 2 (2023): 361–76, doi.org/10.1111/aman.13817.

47. 47 Caraher, ‘Slow Archaeology’; Jade d’Alpoim Guedes, Sara Gonzalez and Isabel Rivera-Collazo, ‘Resistance and Care in the Time of Covid-19: Archaeology in 2020’, American Anthropologist 123, no. 4 (2021): 898–915, doi.org/10.1111/aman.13669; Michael Given, ‘The Precarious Conviviality of Watermills’, Archaeological Dialogues 25, no. 1 (2018): 71–94, doi.org/10.1017/S1380203818000089.

48. 48 Roberta Gilchrist, Sacred Heritage: Monastic Archaeology, Identities, Beliefs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), doi.org/10.1017/9781108678087.

49. 49 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987).

50. 50 ‘“Appallingly Unethical”: Why Australian Universities Are at Breaking Point’.

51. 51 A recent example spanning history, archaeology, languages and Indigenous studies can be found in Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker and Jakelin Troy, eds, Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

52. 52 H. W. Marsh, U. W. Jayasinghe and N. W. Bond, ‘Improving the Peer-Review Process for Grant Applications: Reliability, Validity, Bias, and Generalizability, American Psychologist 63, no. 3 (2008): 160–8, doi.org/10.1037/0003-066x.63.3.160.

53. 53 Thom Van Dooren, A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2022), doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14579.001.0001.

54. 54 Victoria Rawlings, James Flexner and Lynette Riley, eds, Community-Led Research: Walking New Pathways Together (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2021), doi.org/10.30722/sup.9781743327579.

55. 55 D’Alisa, Demaria and Kallis, Degrowth.

56. 56 Catherine J. Frieman, An Archaeology of Innovation: Approaching Social and Technological Change in Human Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), doi.org/10.7765/9781526132659.

57. 57 Afonso, ‘How Archaeology Resembles a Drug Gang’.

58. 58 John Ross, ‘Australian Government R&D Contribution Hits All-Time Low’, Times Higher Education, 29 April 2023, www.timeshighereducation.com/news/australian-government-rd-contribution-hits-all-time-low.