For its 21st year, CHAT comes to Plymouth. People from across the creative and cultural industries and academic will respon to the themes 'ACTIVATE' and 'BUSY' through archaeologies spanning the post-medieval to the present and the future.

If archaeology explores material change through time, how can creative archaeological practices inform understandings of the terms ACTIVATE - activisms, actions, beginnings, enlivenings - and BUSY - late capitalist work culture, being occupied, cluttered, neoliberal wellness mantra? What are the contemporary and historical archaeological forms of ACTIVATE and BUSY - as both seperate and intersecting themes - and how might this inform the way we (might) live?

Through papers, tours, creative practice-as-research, and social gathering the conference will explore new material and spatial insights into the ongoing legacies of colonialism; the operation of power structures; practices that produce beauty and 'otherwiseness' out of idiosyncratic 'capitalist cracks'. We wish to stimulate conversations about the material workings of complicity, recuperation, subversion, divergence, and the liberation of humans and non-humans from extant radicalised, gendered, class-based inequalities.

This event is supported by The Bridge, University of Plymouth.