Tag: mental health
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Who Gets to Feel Good in Archaeology?
Over the past decade, there has been a lot of attention drawn to the benefits of archaeological fieldwork on the mental health of participants (e.g., Finnegan 2016, Rathouse 2019, Everill et al. 2020, Dobat et al. 2022). And while it is wonderful to see people have such a positive experience with archaeology, I have to
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Finding Hope in Archaeology at the End of the World
At the time of writing this, it is 10am in the United Kingdom on the 6th November 2024. As an American migrant over here, I’ve unsurprisingly been watching with dread as the results begin to trickle in and despite my deep criticisms of electoral politics, its hard not to feel very depressed and worried about
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Digging While Depressed and Disabled: Mental Health and Accessibility in Archaeological Practice
This is the transcript from a talk I gave in April 2022 for the Enabled Archaeology session of the CIfA2022 Conference. It is an extension of my original blog post on Digging While Depressed, which you can read here. Digging While Depressed (Fitzpatrick 2018, 2019) was the result of my experiences after being injured on-site
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On Embracing Liminality and Fighting Precarity: Moving Onwards from 2022
It’s been a tough year…for everyone, to be honest! But for me, it’s been a bit of a wake-up call after finding myself somewhat comfortably situated in grad school life since 2015. At the end of 2021, I graduated with my PhD and had secured my first proper research position at a university (albeit in
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Entitlement, Bitterness, and Grief: The Post-PhD Job Hunt Experience
If you follow me on Twitter, you have likely noticed the uptick in Tweets complaining about my job search over the past few months – most likely before either unfollowing or muting me (and frankly, I can’t blame you!). With my current contract ending in a few months and lacking the legal entitlement to any
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You Will Never Be Indiana Jones: How Toxic Masculinity Spurs Sexism and Ableism in Archaeology
The following post is an article that was originally written and published for Lady Science, a wonderful online magazine that has now sadly ended its publication . I am very grateful for the chance to originally publish with the amazing team behind Lady Science, who gave me the confidence and the support necessary to write
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Archaeology in a Time of Crisis
“When future archaeologists stumble upon the archaeological record from this period, the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020, what will they find…?” There’s probably dozens of archaeologists out there with something like that sitting in their drafts. Hell, I spent a solid 5 minutes considering it myself before promptly shutting it down. “Not everything has to be
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“I Love Dying and Being Dead” – Late Capitalism and Modern Perceptions of Death
Lately, archaeologists have been a bit concerned about memes. No, not because they’re trying to perfect their comedic skills – rather, there’s been a relatively recent rash of popular memes that were derived from several big archaeological finds. For example, a nearly complete human skeleton was recovered in Pompeii, originally interpreted to have been crushed
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Digging While Depressed: Struggling with Fieldwork and Mental Health
This post will be focused on dealing with mental illness, so if issues related to depression and anxiety are triggering to you, please feel free to skip today’s blog. Take care of yourself. A few weeks ago, I was in Scotland doing fieldwork for the first time in years. Prior to this trip, I was
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When the Stress of the PhD Meet The Anxiety of the Visa: On International Postgraduate Studies, Financial Anxieties, and Everything Else That Scares Me
This week I had scheduled a different blog post to be published, but I felt as though it didn’t seem right to not write about something that has been on my mind lately. And by “lately”, I mean “for the past few years”. As many, if not all, of you know by now due to
Animal Archaeology 