Geographies of Displacement: Art in the Atomic Age
A HumanitiesX Course Showcase
This online showcase is part of a series designed to capture the work of the 2021–22 HumanitiesX cohort at DePaul University. In Spring 2022, three teams of HumanitiesX Fellows created three unique project-based courses. See the other courses’ showcase posts here.
The Course
Geographies of Displacement: Art in the Atomic Age was co-designed by Dr. Yuki Myamoto, (Religious Studies), Dr. Kerry Ross (History), and Saira Chambers, Director of the Chicago Japanese Culture Center (JCC)/Executive Director of the Japanese Arts Foundation (JAF).
Students in the course explored how people and communities affected by the trauma of migration, war, and discrimination in Japan and the United States communicate their experiences and negotiate their identity through art. The Atomic Age, beginning arguably with the inception of the Manhattan Project in 1942 through the present day, was the historical focus of the course.
In addition to learning the history of Japanese forced migration, displacement, and internment, students in the course worked with and learned from practicing artists, art historians, and curators, focusing on the ways that art has been used to negotiate identity and trauma in the Atomic Age.
The key experiential learning activities in Geographies of Displacement were the following:
- A field trip to the Garden of Phoenix
- A field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, to discuss the transom panels from the Phoenix Hall at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition
- Paper-making workshop Ms. Mami Takahashi at the Japanese Culture Center
- Guest speaker visit from Ms. Molly Hurley (MA student at Maryland Institute College of Art)
- Public panel discussion on the DePaul campus: “Art-in-Between: Trauma, Identity, and Representation,” with Dr. Michael Koerner, Ms. Mami Takahashi, Mr. Jason Matsumoto, and Ms. Mayumi Lake
The Course Project
In collaboration with our community partner, the Japanese Arts Foundation, each student created a unique floating lantern that was exhibited at the end of the quarter in a student-curated public exhibition at Rotofugi Gallery. Students, working on teams, created social media and website content to promote the event.
The students have also been invited to float their lanterns at the first-ever Toro-Nagashi Floating Lantern Ceremony in Chicago, to be held in August 2022 to commemorate the historical event of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the Garden of the Phoenix in Jackson Park. Toro-Nagashi originated from a Buddhist ritual to communicate with ancestors’ spirits, and lantern floating was adopted a few years after the atomic bombing in Hiroshima.
What the Students Said…
“The Japanese and Japanese American community has had a huge impact on Chicago, but much of that is forgotten or dismissed because of Japanese incarceration during WW2, prejudice, and oppression. The only way we can educate Chicagoans about this important history is to bring them to Japanese spaces in Chicago (The Japanese Culture Center, The Garden of the Phoenix) and educate them about what they mean. [We had a chance to do that ourselves, as a class.] The paper-making field trip was my favorite because we were able to get hands-on experience making the paper for our lanterns and it was a great way to bond with the rest of the class. I also really liked the final art exhibition because I was able to see all our hard work come to fruition. We really became a family by the end of the class.” Justyna Lepa
“I came away from this class with a better understanding of my own identity because of all the insightful reflections and discussions we had. We learned a lot of in-depth stuff about Asian American history, and it was nice being able to share parts of my identity and culture that I usually don’t have a chance to talk about.” Vincent Abella
The Course Team
Saira Chambers is a DePaul University alumna and the Director of the Chicago Japanese Culture Center and Executive Director of the Japanese Arts Foundation. With an emphasis on community driven and innovative exhibition models and programs, her work explores the art, history, and culture of Japan globally to bridge cultural competence and cross-cultural perspectives.
Yuki Miyamoto is a Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University, specializing in nuclear ethics and environmental ethics. She has published three monographs, Beyond the Mushroom Cloud (2011), Naze Genbaku ga aku dewa nainoka (2020), and A World Otherwise (2021) and several articles on commemoration, representation, and gender. She is currently working on structural violence, including epistemic injustice, manifested as discrimination against the irradiated bodies in Japan.
Kerry Ross is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at DePaul University, specializing in modern Japanese history. Her research and teaching interests include modern visual culture, gender and women’s history, consumerism and everyday life, and the history of bathing practices, bathrooms and kitchens, Japanese immigration/migration.
Sergio Godinez is a HumanitiesX Student Fellow. Sergio is a rising junior at DePaul University double majoring in American Studies and Political Science with a minor in Spanish.
Yessica Pineda is a HumanitiesX Student Fellow. Yessica graduated from DePaul University in Spring 2022 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and a double minor in Marketing and Art.
Lessons Learned
- Collaborating with the Japanese Cultural Center/Japanese Arts Foundation was beneficial to our students, and instructors incorporated workshops in their courses. Students participated in two sessions of paper-making workshops at the JCC/JAF. Some students had never visited the JCC and appreciated the JCC/JAF as a cultural hub in Chicago.
- There were two kinds of assignments in the course that were challenging to integrate. One type of assignment asked students to do and reflect on their experiential learning; the other asked them to analyze readings and develop analytical and critical skills. One area of future improvement for the course is to determine how to better integrate these two types of assignments.
- Teaching a theoretical framework coupled with experiential learning required more time of students and faculty than does a course without experiential elements. Another area of future improvement is to figure out techniques for focusing experiential work and integrating them with theoretical inquiry.
Next Steps
- Miyamoto has worked with two Chicago Public School (CPS) teachers and a parent at National Teachers’ Academy to develop curriculum to teach nuclear history to sixth graders. They finished a 2-week pilot version in May. During the summer, this emerging collaborative will strategize on ways to expand this course to other grades and possibly other schools. They also hope to include making paper lanterns with the help of JCC/JAF.
- Ross received a summer University Research Council grant from DePaul to support research that stemmed directly from the issues raised in this class. “Geisha in Golden-Age American TV: Housewives, Enlightened Femininity and Democratized Domesticity in 1950s and 60s America” is an article-length project that will investigate the ways that women from Japan have been represented on American television in the 1950s and 1960s to demonstrate a gendered perspective on cold war orientalist discourse, in which white, middle-class American housewives are models of enlightened femininity whose role was to educate naïve Japanese women in the art and politics of democratized domesticity. The grant also supports hiring a student research assistant.
- The JCC will continue to develop Toro-Nagashi ceremony with DePaul University, and bridge new event partnerships with the Museum of Science and Industry, Garden of the Phoenix Foundation, Obama Center, Journal of the Atomic Scientists, University of Chicago, and other potential important collaborators to make this a major annual event for the City of Chicago. JCC wishes to further explore how to make this an enduring relationship with DePaul University to ensure the continued collaboration and partnership.
- The instructors for the class will submit a proposal to the Chicago Quarter Class to teach a class tentatively titled, “Nuclear Chicago.” The course will focus on Chicago as the site of the development of nuclear weapons in the Manhattan Project. The course will explore the history of the development of nuclear weapons, the use and testing of nuclear weapons, ethics of nuclear energy and arms, and the impact of nuclear weapons on the lives of Chicagoans. Students will take field trips to historically important sites including the site of Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, where a viable method for plutonium production that could fuel a nuclear reaction was designed.
