In the US, universities and disciplines have been increasingly challenged to demonstrate their value. In some contexts, value is couched in market terms, such as return-on-investment (ROI). Faculty have generally recoiled against the intrusion of business-oriented ideologies into universities. But the resistance often focuses on maintaining the status quo rather than evaluating and addressing the nature of these conversations about academia’s value. One response has been to develop “applied” avenues to tie one’s disciplinary relevance to others' rather than to develop our own strategies to provide more accurate representations of our discipline’s value. However, focusing on only academic relevance has become less effective. External forces have changed the employment landscape, the nature of research funding, and the structure of higher education institutions. Unfortunately, disciplines that appear to have limited relevance are at greater risk of being under- or de-funded. In this talk, I discuss how we can think about relevance more broadly across context, scale, and stakeholders in archaeology and academia in general.
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