Toxic Chicago

Undergraduate / Graduate

In this field trip-rich course, students will learn about Chicago's many toxic environments, focusing in particular on fallout from the city's industrial past and on racialized, unequal distributions of harmful exposure. We will ask: What is unique (and not unique) about the way that Chicago's toxic geography has been shaped by environmental racism? What happens when we think about toxicity on different temporal and geographical scales, from molecule to neighborhood to international corporation, from a day in the life to deep time? How does this trouble everyday ideas about cause and effect, responsibility and liability? And finally, what unique challenges are presented by the difficulty of producing scientific knowledge about toxic environments, especially when it comes to environmental justice activism or other attempts at change-making? We will visit former Superfund sites, city history museums, industrial processing facilities, and environmental justice non-profits, among other sites. Readings will be drawn from environmental anthropology, STS, Black studies, Native studies, and the history of science, and will forefront scholarship about Chicago. Excerpts from final projects will be collected together into a (physical) zine that will be distributed guerilla-style around the city.