Annual Theme
Each year, the
HumanitiesX Advisory Council selects a topical theme that is both timely and lends itself to humanities inquiry. In 2021, in the context of much public debate about the issue, the Council selected
The Environment: Crisis and Action as the theme for the 2022-23 academic year.
Fellows
The 2022-22 cohort of HumanitiesX fellows includes three teams, each comprised of two faculty members from DePaul's College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and a community partner from a Chicago-area nonprofit organization. Each team will collaboratively develop a course related to environmental issues, which will be taught in Spring Quarter 2023. In January, each team will be joined by two Student Fellows, who will assist with course development and deployment.
Team Active Transportation Alliance
Engaging Youth in Community-Centered Advocacy explores how to involve youth in community-centered advocacy projects. Working with our community partner, Active Transportation Alliance (ATA), we will focus on creating texts and designing engagement strategies to involve local youth with the coalition of community members and planning experts who are envisioning the future of Big Marsh Park on Chicago’s Southeast side. Through readings, site visits, and in conversation with community members, students will learn how Friends of Big Marsh and other community organizations have successfully advocated for a park at a former industrial site and investigate why young people are underrepresented in this and other advocacy efforts. In collaboration with ATA, you will work on teams to research, design, and pilot awareness and engagement tactics—such as stories about Big Marsh and its possibilities told in digital media and youth-centered surveys and listening sessions. Our goal is to create processes to better engage young people in the continued redevelopment of Big Marsh and in community-centered advocacy projects in general.
Team Friends of the Chicago River
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Becky Lyons
- Director of Environment, Equity, and Engagement, Friends of the Chicago River
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Rivers of Life: Chicago's South Side and Its Waterways in Words and Images explores and documents human interaction with the Calumet River system on Chicago’s South Side, focusing on issues of environmental justice and environmental racism. In conjunction with the DePaul Publishing Institute, Big Shoulders Books, and our course partner, Friends of the Chicago River, students in the course will begin work on a book of oral-history narratives and photographs that document the Calumet River system and its surrounding communities at this pivotal moment for the environment. Student-interviewer/editors will be tasked with helping community members tell their own stories in their own words, interviewing stakeholders and shaping the raw transcripts into narratives for this book. Additional layers of meaning will be brought to these narratives through documentary photography. In addition to photographing the people whose stories will appear in the book, student-photographers will be charged with documenting the waterways of the Calumet system, as well as the surrounding communities and industrial areas. The project aims to provide Friends of the Chicago River with a readily accessible narrative that allows activists and teachers to examine the human dimensions of an otherwise abstract issue.
Team Sophia's Choice
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Li Jin
Associate Professor and Program Director, Chinese Studies
View Bio
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Phillip Stalley
- Associate Professor and Endowed Professor in Environmental Diplomacy in the Grace School of Applied Diplomacy
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View Bio
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China's Environmental Voices explores how Chinese artists and writers interpret, portray, and confront the widespread environmental degradation in China. Toward that end, we introduce you to a range of Chinese environmental voices, including those of painters, photographers, filmmakers, and fiction writers. We will use the work of Chinese artists and academics not only to better understand China’s environmental challenges, but also to reflect upon the broader causes and consequences of environmental destruction and our own roles in the systems that contribute to it. You will have the opportunity to share what you learn with an audience beyond the classroom through our course partnership with Sophia’s Choice, a local nonprofit that runs the annual Asian Pop-Up Cinema festival, with whom we will organize a public film screening and an event that showcases China’s leading environmental voices.