Faculty Fellows Program
2002-2003 FellowsMarisa Alicea, Associate Professor
School for New Learning
Cartographies of Home: Stories of Migration, Settlement and Displacement
From the very beginning of their arrival in Chicago, Puerto Ricans have been displaced from various city neighborhoods as processes of gentrification have taken hold in communities in which they reside. For her fellowship project, Alicea examined the struggles that Puerto Ricans face in trying to claim spaces for themselves, especially the hurdles that poor members of this group face in trying to secure decent and affordable housing. Alicea conducted fifteen oral history interviews with Chicago Puerto Rican residents, now included in the Latino Chicago Archives of DePaul University's Richardson Library. Based on this work, she organized and hosted a community event, Encuentro de un Pueblo: Puertorriqueños Cuentan Su Historia en Chicago, to explore past and current patterns of migration, settlement and displacement of Puerto Ricans in Chicago. Addressing a standing-room-only crowd at the Hispanic Housing center on the city's west side, Alicea and guest speaker Nélida Pérez, head librarian and archivist of the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter College, discussed the variety of ways in which Puerto Ricans have and can continue to claim physical spaces in the city and their place in the cultural history of Chicago. Extending this theme, the event also featured Pared a Pared: Counter-narratives through the Eyes of the People, a photo exhibit of Chicago Puerto Rican murals documented by Alicea over the past 32 years. This collection subsequently appeared as the inaugural exhibit at the new home of the Institute of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, and will be on display at the Humanities Center beginning in January 2004.
Steve Harp, Assistant Professor
Art and Art History
Pleasant Prairie: Sense of Place, Sense of History
For his fellowship project, Harp undertook a photographic documentary investigation of history in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, an incorporated village which is simultaneously rural, small town, and suburban. Harp's goal was not to look primarily at the history of Pleasant Prairie, but rather to look at the sense of history of residents in Pleasant Prairie. Moving beyond a simple documentation of economic developmental history, his approach was to examine visually the ways in which current residents intertwine their personal histories with a more intangible "sense of place" to create an understanding of themselves and their physical environment. The resulting images reveal a complex, sometimes fragmented intersection of the personal, cultural, and economic. Harp presented these images at the Humanities Center, in an exhibition entitled Visualizing History in Two Communities. The second community represented in this show is the Austin neighborhood, located on Chicago's far west side. In partnership with the Stockyard Institute, a community-based arts education initiative located in Austin, Harp conducted a photography workshop for which participants collaborated in the creation of an Austin Community History Book. This book, developed by and for Austin residents, presents instances of the community's history that are visible in the neighborhood's current physical landscape. The exhibition will remain on display at the Humanities Center through November 2003 and will then be presented in the Pleasant Prairie community. Harp will continue his work on this project during a research leave in 2003-2004.
John Kimsey, Assistant Professor
School for New Learning
Twisted Roots: Music, Politics and the American Dream Blues
Kimsey's project focused on a song cycle that he composed and arranged, and on a public performance of this work, which he scripted and directed. In twisting "the roots," the cycle uses Southern vernacular music styles-idioms like blues, jazz, rockabilly and country song-to map a shadowy American dreamscape where questions of race and power are inextricably intertwined in both political practices and popular music. School for New Learning faculty member David Simpson has called Twisted Roots "a wonderful blend of lyricism and political satire and a bonafide work of American art." The performance, given at DePaul on May 16, 2003, featured Kimsey on guitar and vocals backed by a stellar six-piece ensemble consisting of Cathy Braaten and Lia Nicine McCoo (vocals); Tom Elferdink and Will Sims (horns and keyboards); George Healey (bass) and Brad Newton (drums). Striking screen visuals and a pithy framing narrative rounded out the multimedia event. At the end, the audience-an overflow crowd consisting of students, faculty, friends and passersby drawn in by the sound of the music-gave the performers a standing ovation. Kimsey will be joined by an "unplugged" version of this ensemble in performing selections from Twisted Roots at 9 p.m. on Saturday, November 8, at the Heartland Café in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood.
Mary Jeanne Larrabee, Professor
Philosophy
At the Edge of Creativity
Taking as her point of departure techniques developed by Eugene Gendlin to access one's inner experience, Larrabee investigated the dynamics of a type of creativity not generally found in traditional research-one that emphasizes embodied rather than mental processes. With this notion of creativity in hand, Larrabee explored the ways in which writers who deal closely with their own experiences of ethnic/racial and gender/sex identities may express a type of creativity not sufficiently captured in mainstream understandings. Her work thus extends postmodern discussions of the social, cultural and discursive constructions of the self in the direction of alternative understandings of creativity. Larrabee has further extended the reach of her work by bringing her explorations into the classroom. For her community connection piece, she conducted a series of seven creativity workshops for eighth grade students in the gifted program at Alexander Graham Bell School, a Chicago public school located on the city's north side. She then organized and hosted a public presentation of the students' work. With her research assistant, Julie Zavala, Larrabee created a video of workshop highlights, including student interviews. She plans to repeat the workshop at Bell in winter 2004.
Heidi J. Nast, Associate Professor
International Studies
Disrupting Perceptions: A Photographic History of the Kano Palace, Nigeria
Complementing her scholarly work on the political geography of concubines and the importance of reproduction in shaping early agrarian states in West Africa, Nast created an exhibition of photography documenting the history of the Kano Palace, the largest and oldest extant palace in West Africa. The exhibition photographs, selected from an extensive collection of photos she has taken over the past fifteen years, was on display for several months at DePaul's Humanities Center and at the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University before going on for a three-month run at the DuSable Museum of African American History. The DuSable Museum is the leading national institution of its kind and is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. With her research assistant, Maria Astudillo, Nast developed educational materials for the exhibition. These include a color flyer containing information about the exhibit and the political history of the Kano region; "elite" or high status slavery in comparative context (in collaboration with Warren Schultz and Albert Harrill); and an application form for DePaul's new Africa and Black Diaspora Studies Program. Nast and Astudillo also produced a twelve-page catalogue detailing the history embedded in each of the exhibition photographs and addressing five common misperceptions people have about Africa. The catalogue is the basis of a larger photographic history book project about the palace that Nast plans to publish in collaboration with the Emir of Kano, His Highness Alhaji Ado Bayero.