Christine J. Walley is a Professor of Anthropology at MIT. She is the author of Exit Zero: Family and Class in Post-Industrial Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2013), a co-creator of a documentary film Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story (2017), and director of the Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project (
sechicagohistory.org).
This presentation highlights two linked collaborative projects relating to environmental justice struggles within the multiracial former steel mill region of Southeast Chicago. One focuses on public histories and one on public futures. The Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project represents a collaboration among an all-volunteer community museum, academics, and artists that is currently creating an innovative transgenerational storytelling site that tells the region’s history through objects saved by residents. This public history initiative, in turn, includes an in-progress “i-documentary” about environmental justice activism making claims for alternative futures for the region. In particular, the site highlights a collaborative balloon-mapping project that gathered data about industrial pollutants and sought to create an enhanced sense of public rights after decades of neoliberal diminution of public spheres in post-industrial settings.