AREA Calumet

A retired educator reflects on economic and educational changes in the Region with optimism for a green future.

Top-down and bottom-up ways to imagine a future for the 573-acre site of the storied South Side steel mill.

A poetic account of lifelong anti-authoritarian activism.

The hope and despair of teaching art for social change on the South Side.

A collection of drawings of culturally significant places in The Calumet Region, with curriculum cues and an exhibition project.

Reflections of 40 volumes of local history.

Activists talk about fighting toxic boondoggles in the South Suburbs, working against war, the Peotone airport, and incinerators.

The great Richard M. Daley parking meter giveaway and what some South Side activists are doing about it.

A profile and appreciation of the fragile avian ecology of the Calumet Region marshlands.

Goals and successes of a steadfast environmental organization in Hegewisch.

Circulation: Movement Between Center and Periphery

Chicago and the dynamics of socioeconomic exclusions within and without.

Flows between center and periphery, and without centers and peripheries.

For decades the Great Lakes, the interior’s waterway to the world, has been a site of commercial and political contestation.

A town and a city, both in their ways on the far peripheries of Chicago, once linked through industry, and again thourhg deindustrialization.

Organizing workers who move massive quantities of materials to and through Chicago.

Bushels of wheat in motion, from fields to the Board of Trade.

Working with undocumented immigrants in far-flung detention centers.

Walking 150 miles takes you out of the metro area-go.

New investment in Chicago’s mass transit system reinforces the core-periphery layout.

Touring the social margins of Ben Reitman’s Chicago.

The White City, the Plan of Chicago, and the making of peripheral zones.

The activism and cultures of American Indians clearly situate Chicago in a regional context, informed by generations of displacement and unending resistance.

A Filipina and Chicagoan knits her worlds together through service and activism.

Moving to Chicago from Milano and discovering that you bring a cultural core within yourself.

One of America’s original underground subcultures becomes visible in Pullman’s Hobo Fest.

Mini Section on Curricula

Bringing into the city art students from Roosevelt University’s Schaumburg campus.

Innovative media art-activism goes from classroom to streets in a neighborhood border zone plagued by gang and turf tensions.

The questions that arise when a group of CPS Boone grade schoolers go on a trip to Winnetka’s New Trier High School, where they are received by an activist group.

Reflections on teaching critical perspectives on the city-suburb relationship from the position of an edge city.

Views from the Edge

Real estate trends reach into the landscape of affluence, impoverishing a rich architectural legacy.

People in the ‘burbs without homes are invisible and virtually without support.  The Alliance to End Homelessness in Suburban Cook County and other orgs are trying to address the growing crisis.

The oft-heard story of a political fringe looking for a foothold in a Chicago suburb in the 1970s.

Racial exclusivity took shape in Glen Ellyn long before the white flight of the 60s.

How it got to be this way: a timeline

Three small-scale farming projects in southwestern Michigan with Chicago origins and links.

An artist’s role in the 28-year campaign that defeated the proposed Crandon Mine in northern Wisconsin, aka vacation land for Milwaukee, Chicago, and population centers downstate.

A view into a mostly unseen tract just outside the Loop, visited only by urban bohemian adventurers and developers with outsized ambitions.

The resistance politics of El Barrio come out of both a neighborhood and an island in the Carribbean.

Seeing the overlooked and erased elements from the city’s past with the group Forgotten Chicago.

Looking for the written word and odd voice outside of the mainstream book retailers.

Perhaps disability, being the universal marginal condition at some point experienced by practically all, should be at the center of liberation struggles, not the edges.

HIV/AIDS is increasingly a Black people’s epidemic,  but remains out of central sight as a crisis.

Voices critical of Illinois’s remote Tamms supermax prison blend high theory and grassroots activism.

Excerpts from responses to an open question bring feminism back to the center as discourse, value system, and life experience.

Calling poets to political arms.  To be read out loud!

A letter to a jailed comrade excavates personal histories at the margin of radical legacies.