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SUMMARY:'Livelihood strategies and signatures of vulnerability and resilie
 nce in eastern African landscapes' - Prof Paul Lane\, Uppsala University
DTSTART:20161128T170000Z
DTEND:20161128T180000Z
UID:TALK69153@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Victoria Jones
DESCRIPTION:We live in a world of heightened concern with both vulnerabili
 ty and resilience. The terms circulate repeatedly within the public sphere
 \, and the political classes increasingly mobilise the concepts\, with eit
 her positive or negative spins\, to bolster their ideological positions. T
 he idea of resilience is\, perhaps\, the more ambiguous of the two notions
 . On the one hand\, resilience is something to be actively promoted and as
 sessed. Yet\, on the other\, some practices deemed to be resilient may act
  against risk taking and potential innovation and may\, in the longer term
 \, work against societal development. Whereas resilience is generally rega
 rded as an outcome of deliberate action\, vulnerability is typically seen 
 to be a condition and often defined solely by external observers rather th
 an agents themselves. In other words\, vulnerability is often portrayed as
  being a state of susceptibility to harm\, and the obverse of resilience. 
  Vulnerability is also highly relative – a vulnerable person\, community
 \, sites\, artefact\, landscape\, society\, etc. is only ever vulnerable t
 o a prescribed set of threats\, which may even be neither understood nor p
 erceived as such in some quarters. Within archaeology\, both resilience an
 d vulnerability have received periodic attention. In the current context o
 f escalating climate change and heightened awareness of these trends at lo
 cal\, regional and global levels\, both terms have acquired particular res
 onance and are invoked to both leverage funding and guide interventions ai
 med at protecting archaeological resources. In this presentation\, I will 
 outline some of the ways these terms are being used in the discipline\, th
 e challenges involved in identifying either resilience or vulnerability ar
 chaeologically\, and finally\, what archaeologists working in eastern Afri
 ca (and elsewhere) might be able to contribute to discussions of these con
 cepts and how their data sets may be of benefit when planning for more sus
 tainable futures.
LOCATION:Seminar Room S1 Alison Richard Building\, 7 West Road\, Cambridge
  CB3 9DT
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