Dis/Placements: A People’s History of Uptown Public History Project Co-led by Dr. Anna Guevarra and Dr. Gayatri Reddy is Now Live
https://www.dis-placements.com
This project is based on over three years of research, curricular work with students, as well as close involvement and collaboration with Uptown and its various histories and communities. As a counter-narrative to more celebratory narratives of “urban renewal,” we center the perspectives of Uptown's residents and community activists - including multiple racial and ethnic, largely poor and working class people - chronicling their radical opposition to such displacement efforts or what they referred to as the city's "urban removal" policies. The project, therefore, visualizes and narrates both the various displacement efforts as a result of such policies of urban renewal, as well as peoples’ intentional acts of place-making, resistance and solidarity – to produce Uptown as the multiracial, affordable anomaly that it was (and remains!) in a segregated and rapidly gentrifying Chicago.
Dis/Placements chronicles the texture of these resilient lives through a range of digital media and platforms. We invite you to explore our project, offer your valuable feedback, and to share your own stories of Uptown. Our website chronicles the various initiatives we have undertaken, listed under ‘projects’:
- Take a virtual walking tour of Uptown to explore significant sites in the neighborhood that tell these stories, drawing on oral history narratives, archival research, as well as print and visual material that some of you have published and circulated.
- View an interactive 3D timeline for a snapshot of 200 years of Uptown’s history.
- Listen to podcasts chronicling the memories of residents of the 4600 block of Winthrop Ave, subject to racial segregation.
- Explore zines, photoessays, digital stories and other art work made by UIC students as they learned about Uptown in our classes.
Dr. Guevarra is the founding director of the Global Asian Studies Program and a co-PI of the UIC AANAPISI Initiative. She is also the co-PI of the Social Justice and Human Rights Cluster and a member of the Diaspora Cluster at UIC. Professor Guevarra's scholarly, creative, and teaching interests focus on immigrant and transnational labor, the geopolitics of carework, critical diaspora studies, and community engagement as they relate to dynamics of race, gender, and empire.
Dr. Reddy’s is an associate professor in Anthropology, and Gender & Women's Studies and an affiliate faculty in Global Asian Studies. She is a sociocultural anthropologist and her research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of sexuality, gender, health, and the politics of subject and community-formation in India, as well as within the immigrant South Asian queer community in the U.S. Broadly, her work interrogates the contours of cultural belonging through the paradoxical dialectic of “alienation and intimacy.”