By — Against Equality, a radical queer editorial collective, engages with a rich, dense queer history where queers and many allies fought for justice and against war, the confines of gender norms and marriage, and the prison industrial complex.
By — An earlier version of this essay was written in May 2011 for a “Pedagogic Notebook” edited by Sitesize (Spain), but was revised in March 2012 for publication in areachicago.org. “Healthy social movements need spaces for learning and experimentation, healthy democracies need wise citizens to make wise decisions about resources and politics, and healthy people need [...]
By — “If we the people protest for the people, the reflex will be lethal! We can make a change!” says sixteen-year-old fm Supreme, as she hops off the Summer Fest Hip-Hop Arena stage in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. Using her mc-ing name, fm Supreme tells me that participation in one of Kuumba Lynx ‘s After School Matters [...]
By — Introduction This year at University of Illinois Laboratory High School in Champaign- Urbana, about twenty students in the Social Advocacy II class focused on vegetable oil as alternative fuel for the semester project. There were five basic components to this project: converting a car to run on Straight Vegetable Oil (svo), researching and producing biodiesel, [...]
By — Text Originally from www.teachersforjustice.org, January 6, 2005 Teachers for Social Justice is a network of Chicago area teachers committed to critical, anti-racist, multicultural, participatory, democratic education. We believe that real school improvement requires the full participation of those with the most stake in high quality public education for all students –families, students, community members, and [...]
By — This spring marked the end of an era in Chicago’s arts educational programming. After almost fifteen years of creative history, Chicago’s prestigious Gallery 37 (g37) has been merged into the larger, administrative structure of the After School Matters (asm) organization. Though it remains to be seen whether this merger will be friendly or hostile, the [...]
By — AREA Begins In the mid-spring months of 2005, I started meeting regularly with Jim Duignan, an artist and educator who has been initiating a wide range of collaborative projects under the name of the Stockyard Institute for the last ten years. I had been looking for an opportunity to collaborate with Stockyard for some time, [...]
By — On June 18th, 2005, twenty teenagers from Young Chicago Authors (YCA) walked next door to face the “Axe Effect” ad erected not even a week after the YCA Mural , a series of nine huge panels created by the artist Chris Silva in partnership with community youth , was torn down by developers who are [...]
By — The images and visuals used within this curriculum unit focus on Waukegan, Illinois, a city of 88,000 people located on the shores of Lake Michigan, 40 miles north of Chicago. However, it is hoped that area educators, activists, and artists will collaborate on similar visual sociologies within their own neighborhoods and communities in the Chicago [...]
By — At the height of the summer, foodies jam Chicago farmers’ markets in pursuit of fresh fruit and heirloom vegetables. For nine years, the Chicago non-profit Growing Home has worked to transform perceptions that these markets are solely the hunting grounds of the well-heeled, by providing employment opportunities for homeless and low-income Chicagoans. Recruits of this [...]
By — If oppression is the force that divides, then solidarity is the practice of reclaiming our unions and bonds. In a city like Chicago— where neighborhood boundaries, gang turfs, and racial segregation keep people separated from one another—it is difficult to see all the ways that we are connected. Occasionally there are those moments when we [...]
By — While working at a local museum, a label in an exhibit I developed was censored by the museum’s director. She objected to a quote I included as a caption to a photo of an environmental activist working on toxic waste clean-up in one low income community. The activist, a woman with a history of noted [...]
By — The term “parachuting” is probably familiar to anyone who has ever worked on a community-specific public project. It is a word that public artists and activists alike dread, as it is usually remarked in derision: it poses questions of authenticity, legitimacy, and sincerity, and critiques the artist’s role within, or commitment to, the community for [...]
By — I first stepped through the 110-year-old front doors of Humboldt Park’s James Russell Lowell Elementary in September of 2005 as a new volunteer with the Northwestern University Settlement House’s AmeriCorps Project YES! program. The Lowell administration had announced a number of ambitious new projects in confronting their second year of probation under the No Child [...]