Workshop for cultural heritage caretakers

This is a Call for Papers issued by the European Association of Archaeologists for a conference (www.e-a-a.org), which will be held in Belgrade, Serbia on September 3-6, 2025:

Are you a heritage caretaker? Does your fieldwork involve working with local communities? Are you designing or running community engagement programs? Then join us at the EAA conference in Belgrade (3-6/09/2025) to bring out the challenges we face and possible solutions to move forward in our field (check out our workshop #254 here: https://lnkd.in/dW6gAqm9)

Participants will be divided into working groups to collaborate in organised discussions and exercises about the main topics and findings resulting from our 2024 workshop at the EAA Rome: methods, selection of audiences, non-participants and reasons for not getting involved, power dynamics, conflicting issues, limitations common values, and future steps to be taken. With the moderators’ facilitation, participants are asked to focus on best practices and methodologies they have implemented so far, indicating the specific characteristics of the communities they have worked with, problems and conflicts they face when organizing and executing their actions, goals and objectives for future actions and synergies.

This year the workshop is co-designed by a larger team of four facilitators, it will have a longer duration and new working methodologies will be implemented. At the end of the workshop topics emerging from each group will be presented to everyone so that an overall discussion is generated.

The purpose is to build an experience-based process that depends on the contributions of professionals and initiatives that do community engagement, with the ultimate aim of formulating and publishing an inventory of best practices to engage local communities in archaeology and heritage.

Please note that this is not a workshop based on paper presentations, but an interactive one based on teamwork, case studies and experience from the field.

To apply, please send us a short description (up to 250 words) of the project you are working on by 15 April 2025. If your application is successful, you will be notified within a few days.

Once selected you will need to register at www.e-a-a.org to secure your participation, if you haven’t already. Keep in mind participation in the workshop is compatible with other presentations in the conference.

As we are only the organizers of this workshop, unfortunately we are not involved in any funding application processes, which is a matter to be directly discussed with the EAA secretariat.