Rivers of Life: Chicago’s South Side Waterways in Words and Images
This online showcase is part of a series designed to capture the work of the HumanitiesX fellows and students at DePaul University. Over the 2022–23 academic year, three teams of HumanitiesX fellows created unique community-engaged, project-based courses in the humanities. These new courses were taught in spring 2023 See the other showcase posts, including those from spring 2021, on the HumanitiesX website.
The Course
Rivers of Life is an oral history and documentary photography course developed by professors Steve Harp (Art, Photography) and Miles Harvey (English), in partnership with Community Fellow Becky Lyons of the Chicago nonprofit Friends of the Chicago River. Students in the course explored the environmental, economic, racial, and social issues that affect those who live near the Calumet River system on Chicago’s Southeast Side. The class made three visits to the area, hearing from residents and activists, taking documentary photographs, and conducting oral history interviews. By combining firsthand experience with creative documentary work, students gained perspective on how these communities are still impacted by the region’s industrial history.
Throughout the course, students learned how to conduct interviews and edit transcripts, as well as how to shoot documentary photographs. Each student worked with a classmate to interview a community member from the Southeast Side and to edit the resulting 20+-page transcript into a short narrative. Each student also submitted a thematically unified portfolio of fifteen photographs from among the many they’d taken on visits to the region.
Students also had the opportunity to learn from guest speakers throughout the course. The first guest was HumanitiesX Community Fellow Becky Lyons of Friends of the Chicago River, who spoke to the students about the history of pollution in Chicago’s river systems and the corresponding cleanup efforts. Harp and Harvey arranged for the students to visit multiple sites on the Southeast Side and to meet with stakeholders who introduced them to the Calumet system’s waterways, industrial areas, and neighboring communities. The class was also visited by author and activist Sister Helen Prejean, noted for her bestselling book Dead Man Walking, who spoke about her life and career and with whom students practiced for their interviews.
The Project
The eventual goal of the collaboration between Harp and Harvey and Friends of the Chicago River is to produce a published photo/text book about the environmental, economic, racial and social issues that affect those who live near the Calumet River system. This book will be published by DePaul’s nonprofit Big Shoulders Books, which produces books that engage intimately with the Chicago community and, in the process, give students hands-on, practical experience in book publishing. Friends hopes to use the book, which will be distributed free of charge, like all Big Shoulders Books, in their education and advocacy efforts.
Because producing a book requires more time than the ten weeks of the course, the class itself worked toward an end-of-quarter exhibit and event. The opening event was held during finals week in DePaul’s Richardson Gallery, to showcase the students’ work and foster engagement between activists, academics, and the community.
The opening event attracted over forty attendees, including community activists, educators, and students, many of whom brought their friends and family along. Three of the environmental activists interviewed for this project — Peggy Salazar, Robert Garcia, and Samuel Corona — spoke at the event about their community, which, they stressed, is often ignored or overlooked by residents of other parts of Chicago. Friends of the Chicago River also showcased their Natural Solutions Tool, which allows users to explore data to better understand and address complex environmental challenges, like those caused by the legacy of industrial pollution along the Calumet River system.
The Team
Faculty Fellow Miles Harvey teaches creative writing in DePaul’s English Department. His most recent book, The King of Confidence (Little, Brown & Co., 2020), was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selection and was long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Harvey also wrote The Island of Lost Maps (Random House, 2000) and Painter in a Savage Land (Random House, 2008). He is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books and the director of the DePaul Publishing Institute.
Faculty Fellow Steve Harp is an Associate Professor and the Area Head of the Photography and Media Art concentration in The Art School. As a teacher/artist, he works at creating and sequencing images, and presenting them in the form of photographs, videos, and artist’s books. He approaches photography as a process revolving around considerations of history, place, ephemerality, transience, and liminality. Over the past decade, he has been working primarily in the form of the photographic artist’s book.
Student Fellow Mayra Shuja is a graduate student studying Sustainable Urban Development. She has a BA in Architecture. She recently wrote an article for HumanitiesX on Chicago’s circular economy incubator, the Plant. During the Rivers of Life course, she worked with her collaborating Student Fellow Miranda to conduct an interview for the project, provide field trip support, and support the group work in the course. In the summer following the course, Mayra secured an internship with the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, working as a planning intern.
Student Fellow Miranda Kincer is an undergraduate student studying Writing and Rhetoric. She has minors in History and Creative Writing. With Mayra, Miranda participated in, documented, and supported the work of the course. Miranda is traveling with course collaborator Becky Lyons and HumanitiesX faculty director Lisa Dush to present on HumanitiesX at the 2023 Conference on Community Writing.
Community Fellow Becky Lyons is Director of Environment, Equity, and Engagement for Friends of the Chicago River, leading the engagement team and the nonprofit’s diversity, equity and inclusion work. Friends is the only organization solely dedicated to the Chicago River system and has been working to improve the health of the river for the benefit of people, plants and animals. It works in partnership with municipalities, businesses, community groups, schools, peer organizations, government agencies and individuals on projects that can improve the river system.
Becky’s focus is on building community and connecting people with nature in equitable ways. Becky is an environmental educator and urban planner, with a Masters in Urban Planning and Policy from University of Illinois at Chicago. She spent ten years as an environmental educator at Lincoln Park Zoo, and most recently worked for UIC’s Freshwater Lab on a Chicago River-focused project before joining the Friends team in April 2022.
Lessons Learned and Next Steps
The overall scope of the project Profs. Harp and Harvey initially envisioned was larger than could ever be accomplished in a single class. This became obvious even before the quarter began, so one of the lessons learned early on was that the course would necessarily be a first step in a much larger process. That being said, Profs. Harp and Harvey feel that it was a highly successful first step, both in terms of the progress made on a potential book project and in terms of the overall experience for the students, several of whom have expressed an interest in carrying on with the work, either as an independent study or on their own time.
Thanks to HumanitiesX support, all students were able to spend focused time in a part of Chicago they might not have otherwise have visited, interviewing people with experiences vastly different from their own, learning hands-on lessons about the effects of industrial pollution on disenfranchised communities, and working in a sometimes thrilling, sometimes messy collaborative creative process (as all creative work inevitably is) — one that harnessed the collective knowledge, skills, and perspectives of a group to achieve a common goal. While the logistics were sometimes complicated, they were not insurmountable: by organizing their visits to the Southeast Side (which is not an easy trip from DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus) on Fridays — the first two via school bus and the second two with Harp and Harvey driving rented vans — the students were able to have a rich and productive experience of the area.
Profs. Harp and Harvey are excited to continue the collaboration. They plan to return together to the Calumet region, meeting with residents and activists, as well as conduct research at a local historical society to determine whether an impressive collection of oral-history interviews with local residents, collected over the past 50 years, might be of possible use in the book.
In the coming academic year, Prof. Harvey plans to teach an oral-history course that will include both graduate and undergraduate students (ENG 484 and ENG 376), assisted by a student from the HumanitiesX course who has requested to continue supporting this project through independent study. Meanwhile Prof. Harp hopes to teach a simultaneous course, ART 328: Documentary Photography, which will have a substantive module that applies course knowledge in a community-engaged project documenting the Calumet system.
