‘This Whole Project Has Given Me Focus, Hope and Positivity’: The Co Presentation of Findings

I was explicitly clear with everyone who became involved in the Homeless Heritage project that the intention was to present our findings publically in a number of ways. We did this by co-publishing articles in popular magazines and peer-reviewed journals, speaking at public meetings and academic conferences, and through co-curating two interactive public exhibitions on the heritage of homelessness. It was important to spread the ways in which our findings were presented across a variety of platforms so that our results reached diverse audiences; for example, John Schofield, my homeless colleagues, and I published co-authored articles in The Big Issue, and in British Archaeology, in the hope that our work might reach people outside academia. That said, we were equally keen to demonstrate that the Homeless Heritage project was just as valid as archaeological investigations into any other marginalized culture or period so we also published co-authored peer-reviewed papers in Public Archaeology, Post-Medieval Archaeology, and created, in collaboration with artist Mats Brate, a comic based on fieldwork for the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. Further to this, various book chapters were co-produced for academic books,6 and I have since published a paper for the International Journal of Heritage Studies, which focused on how cultural heritage methodologies can function as tools for empowerment. I encouraged my homeless colleagues to co-present papers at a variety of conferences and public talks. Jane, Danny, Deano, and Whistler co-presented a paper entitled ‘Punks and Drunks: Counter Mapping Homeless Heritage’ at the conference of the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) at the University of Bristol in 2010, while Andrew, Jane, Dan, and Mark co-presented a paper called ‘Stories from the Street: Contemporary Homelessness as Heritage’ at the Postgraduate Conference in Historical Archaeology at the University of Leicester Centre for Historical Archaeology in 2011. To me, it was essential that those homeless colleagues who wanted to remain involved with the project once fieldwork had been completed were given real opportunities to do so.