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The effect of the mismatch between the numbers of forced migrants that host governments are prepared to deal with and the actual number of those seeking refuge is that many forced migrants must find what I term ‘reluctant’ refuge—precarious, unofficial shelter. In this article, I first theorize ‘reluctance’, before introducing the concept of archaeology of the contemporary world in order to establish what makes fieldwork drawn on explicitly archaeological. Following this, I offer a concise history of the current political situation in Athens before describing my methodology. I then provide three ‘portraits’ of sites of temporary refugee shelter in the city—a squat, a non-governmental organization-managed hotel and a co-operative day centre—and discuss how these inter-relate to form a landscape of reluctant refugee shelter. The article contributes an explicitly ‘translational’ (Zimmerman et al. 2010) view of how experiences of shelter affect and shape forced displacement in Athens.

Later in the article, I explore how an explicitly feminist critical theoretical perspective might improve collaborative community-based participatory research projects, performing important work for women and highlighting the existence and causes of other forms of oppression, many of which -racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism -are undergoing a disappointing revival in these globally troubling times. In so doing, I remake a powerful case for Open Archaeology that is collaborative, participatory, public, and also feminist and activist.To start then, what do we mean by the terms, 'collaborative', 'participatory', 'public' and 'democratisation'? Collaborative, participatory, public, and democratisation: a discussion of terms commonly used in the context of community archaeologyRather like the nuanced differences between the terms 'multidisciplinary', 'interdisciplinary ', and 'transdisciplinary' (Nilsson Stutz, 2018, p. 49), terms such as 'collaborative', 'participatory', 'public', and 'democratisation' are used liberally in the titles of community archaeology journal articles but rarely unpacked. This is not necessarily because community archaeologists do not think deeply about what these terms mean (Atalay, 2012). On the contrary, efforts are being made to properly analyse collaborative archaeology approaches in such ways that evaluation based methodological frameworks may be shared (Guilfoyle &