The Eastwick Place and Community Memory Project: Refuse, Refuge and Oral History in the New Public Environmental Humanities

• In Event: OHA Poster Session and Project Bazaar

Abstract

This showcase explores key themes raised by the ongoing Eastwick Place and Community Memory Oral History Project, a community-based collaborative project documenting the intersecting environmental, cultural, and activist histories of Philadelphia's Eastwick neighborhood. The showcase examines what a truly public environmental humanities approach to oral history could look like and the opportunities oral history methodology presents for exploration of entanglements of attachment to place, environmental health and social justice.

In the postwar era, Eastwick was the site of an unfinished redevelopment plan which resulted in community displacement and environmental injustices from toxic waste dumping and the redevelopment itself. Our project has centered around the multiple attachments of place, home and belonging in Eastwick's environmental and social histories: a locus for community memorialization; a site of health and environmental justice concern, especially around Superfund activity; a spur for activist organizing; and a way to envision more just futures for Eastwick.

This showcase pays particular attention to method, ethics, power, privilege, collaboration and outreach in a project intended to be deeply co-designed and co-curated. Our project was founded by an interdisciplinary working group of graduate students from the University of Pennsylvania's Program in the Environmental Humanities in partnership with community organizing group the Eastwick Friends and Neighbors Coalition, which has spearheaded pushback to redevelopment and environmental injustice over the last decade. Our narrators have spanned the multiple concerns and affiliations in Eastwick, but forging particular community-based alliances can mean potentially alienating others.

Our showcase will address the "dream" for the project and its realities to date and explore modes of application -- OHMS, pop-up exhibitions, multimedia shorts with archival and material elements -- we are exploring to cultivate deep listening across difference. We hope to explore how we're all neighbors -- and complicit -- in our toxic ecologies and collective solutions.

Authors

• Jeffrey Nagle, University of Pennsylvania

• Jess Lamar Reece Holler, University of Pennsylvania/Western Kentucky University