Heritage Monitoring Scouts: Engaging the Public to Monitor Sites at Risk Across Florida

ABSTRACT

Along Florida’s nearly 13,000 km of shoreline, nearly 4000 archaeological sites and over 600 recorded historic cemeteries are at risk from climate change impacts including coastal erosion and a 2-metre rise in sea level. In 2016, the Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN) created the Heritage Monitoring Scouts (HMS Florida) programme to engage the public in monitoring sites at risk. The programme grew quickly during the first year of operation to include 233 volunteers who submitted 312 monitoring forms. The programme exists beyond the singular act of a volunteer reporting site conditions; across Florida, varied combinations of local partnerships present unique opportunities for programmes, for example, the pilot program at the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve. Preliminary outcomes from the first year of HMS Florida and the pilot indicate the programme is effective in public engagement and a powerful management tool for tracking change to sites over time.     

Creative geographies of ceramic artists: knowledges and experiences of landscape,practices of art and skill

This paper argues for a conception of art as an embodied and creative material practice. It draws on research conducted with seven professional ceramic artists who deal with landscape in their work to explore their processes of art-making through interview and (filmed) observation. It demonstrates the distributed range of embodied and relational more-than-artistic practices which inform how landscape is encountered, known and ultimately represented. It argues that artists’ self-expression in art is based upon material, social and political knowledges which interweave in artists’ lives. By studying ceramicists’ making this paper demonstrates both the non-conscious skill and the conscious technical knowledge needed to make art. It shows chance to have a triple role in practices of making, as something to work alongside, to work against and to draw on as a creative resource. This paper both argues for and demonstrates the value of an approach to art-making that frames it as a complex of both conscious, socio-cultural, technical knowledges and non-conscious skills which together (in)form works of (ceramic) art.     

The Twenty-First Century Federalist

It is unlikely a “third party” will arise to threaten the two-party duopoly that has governed American politics since 1828. It is, however, possible that a new political movement will arise within the Republican Party, stake out new ideological terrain, and make a bid for control of the party apparatus. Movements arise when parties fail to address public challenges, policy entrepreneurs recognize the opportunity, and resources are available to make a bid feasible. Today the two parties have failed to address the increasing fragmentation of American public life. They have, in fact, contributed to fragmentation by appealing to identity politics and by attempting to use the national government as a tool of legal and judicial force against their opponents. A new political movement centered on federalism—the restoration of state and local government and a balance of power between the states and the national government—offers the hope of allowing cultural pluralism to flourish within an overarching political unity. It remains for enterprising candidates to recognize the opportunity and donors to fund them.