Dis/Placements: A People’s History of Uptown Project

Dis/Placements

Co-PIs: Anna Guevarra and Gayatri Reddy

The larger project brings together scholars, students, and community members to create a city virtualization project that traces the histories of displacements in the city of Chicago. The project begins  with one of the most vibrant and diverse neighborhoods in Chicago – Uptown, with its incredibly rich history of multi-racial organizing and resistance. The project intends to create a three-dimensional/virtual reality storytelling platform – encoding spatial, historical, and ethnographic/sensorial data – that capture the struggles and resilience of these neighborhoods, as well as their complex transnational and multi-racial histories. Student-produced digital stories based on oral history narratives with community members, material/built environment and social histories of the neighborhood, as well as primary documents will be mapped on to this platform, generating a living archive of cumulative and collaborative knowledge. Come be a part of this project – share your pictures, tell your stories, write your histories!

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These digital stories represent work done throughout the semester as students conducted oral histories and fieldwork – engaging with the community of Uptown and learning from its current and former residents, community organizers, and business owners.