The 2025 cohort of HumanitiesX fellows includes four teams, each comprised of one or two faculty members from DePaul's College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, a community partner from a Chicago-area nonprofit organization, and one Student Fellow, who will be selected through a competitive application process and join April 2025.Each team collaboratively develops a HumanitiesX course on one of the three HumanitiesX themes (
Immigration and Migration, The Environment: Crisis and Action, or Democracy and Rights) to be offered to DePaul students in Autumn Quarter 2025.
Team Lumpen Radio
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Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera
Professor, Latin American and Latino Studies
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From FM Waves to Activism: Storytelling of Latino Voices through Community Radio
This course explores the relationship between community radio and Latino migrant communities in Chicago, focusing on radio as a platform for social justice. It examines how community radio amplifies Latino narratives, fosters empowerment, and addresses issues like immigration, labor rights, and healthcare access. With our community partner, Lumpen Radio, students in this class will be guided in scriptwriting, interviewing, editing, and post-production of community audio portraits for radio broadcast.
As a community radio station launched in 2016 in Bridgeport, Chicago, Lumpen Radio strives to amplify diverse voices and engage with local issues. The course includes field trips to Lumpen Radio and ends with a live broadcast event.
Team Women For Economic Justice
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Sanjukta Mukherjee
Associate Professor, Women's and Gender Studies
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Anuradha Rana
- Professor, School of Cinematic Arts
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Ana Romero
- Co-Founder & Director, Women for Economic Justic
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Solidarity Economy: Creating Change Through Feminist Filmmaking
This course draws on transnational and decolonial feminist theories alongside documentary filmmaking practices to explore how global economic shifts, migration, and social and political crises disproportionately affect working-class and immigrant women of color. While these women often hold the most precarious, undervalued, and underpaid jobs, they also lead powerful grassroots efforts and build resilient communities through networks of care and solidarity, which are stories this course aims to uplift.
In partnership with Women for Economic Justice (WEJ) in Chicago’s Little Village, students will create short films grounded in ethical storytelling and non-fiction film production methods. Projects will incorporate interdisciplinary feminist research methods such as oral histories, testimonios, and participant observation, emphasizing responsible and reciprocal filmmaking practices. These documentaries will be shared at a public community screening, serving as tools to advance economic and gender justice.
Team Women For Green Spaces
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Environmental Placemaking: Building Community for Environmental Justice This class explores the process of environmental placemaking, the practices used to forge a collective identity for green space as a shared ‘place’. Green spaces can service critical ecological and social functions such as fostering social interactions, building communities, and conserving nature. At the core of environmental placemaking is a consideration of how power and inequality shape environmental outcomes.
Our community partner, Mujeres por Espacios Verdes (Women for Green Spaces), is engaged in environmental placemaking in Pilsen, an environmental justice community overburdened with pollution and underserved by green space currently experiencing rapid gentrification. Students will create a traveling museum exhibit about environmental justice and restoration in Pilsen. The exhibit will be shown at a community-wide event geared towards elementary students and their families at the end of the quarter.
Team Sanctuary Working Group
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Ramya Ramanath
Associate Professor, School of Public Service
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Lien Tran
Associate Professor, School of Design
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Finding Home: Exploring Migrant Housing Challenges and Solutions via Interactive Storytelling
In this course, students will delve into the complex realities facing new migrants as they search for housing in Chicago. Through readings, engaging with oral histories, and direct collaboration with Chicago-based advocates, students will gain a critical understanding of migration and placemaking. Our partnership with Chicago’s
Sanctuary Working Group will bring students face-to-face with the strengths and weaknesses of governmental, nonprofit, and community responses to the need for safe, affordable, and adequate housing for new arrivals.
To raise awareness of these challenges, students will work collaboratively to create interactive story prototypes that ethically convey migrants’ experiences. These stories, created with Twine or H5P, will become part of an online, public-facing archive documenting how a diverse and de-identified group of migrants find and make home in Chicago.