About Us
A People’s History of Uptown
About Us
Dis/Placements is a collaborative public history digital project. It brings together scholars, students, and community members to trace a People’s History of Uptown, a northside neighborhood of Chicago intentionally shaped by multiple forms of displacement and urban renewal, as well as active resistance to such processes. Drawing on a range of sources and platforms - academic scholarship, public and community archives, oral history narratives, students-produced artwork, zines, and digital stories, three-dimensional timelines, virtual walking tours, storymaps, photographs - the Dis/Placements project documents, curates, and visualizes the histories and texture of resilient lives, multiracial poor people’s movements, and as its moniker indicates, displacements as well as intentional place-making on the part of the people of Uptown. We welcome you to this project and to exploring these struggles and celebrations with us!
Image: Sheridan and Lawrence, looking west; Source: IDOT, University of Illinois Chicago Special Collections
What began as an exploration of Asian migrations to Chicago ended up becoming a deeper excavation of one neighborhood - Uptown - and its stories of resistance. We trace this history of the project itself as we embark on this journey.
Image from our interactive timeline; please click on ‘Projects’ to see more.
Using a range of digital mediums and platforms from virtual walking tours to GIS storymaps, interactive timelines to podcasts and video games - Dis/Placements visualizes less-mapped spaces and tells less-told stories of Uptown for a broad public.
Image: Dorothy Lawless and Anna Guevarra; Photo credit: Gayatri Reddy
We are scholars, students, and community members who collaboratively trace the texture and tenor of people’s movements and struggles over land, housing, and community in a neighborhood intentionally targeted for urban “renewal.”
