Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project

The Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project (sechicagohistory.org) represents an artistic and educational collaboration between a community Museum and a project team based at MIT. Southeast Chicago and Northwest Indiana once formed one of the largest industrial corridors in the world. After the region’s mills closed in the 1980s and 90s, residents of this racially and ethnically diverse region began donating photographs, home movies, letters, albums, documents, objects, and oral histories to the all-volunteer Southeast Chicago Historical Museum. The result was a unique and extensive repository of industrial life in the United States from the perspective of ordinary people.

The SECASP website tells the story of the transformation in what it means to be “working-class” in the United States through the objects that residents chose to save about their history and what those objects meant to them. The website includes an online archive and thirteen “featured curations,” or mini-exhibits, on topics such as “Black Experiences in the Mills” and “Women at Work.” The website also includes an innovative “storyline” section. The “storylines” are mini-interactive documentary pieces built from archival objects, i-doc techniques, and contemporary video footage that tell a larger story. Two of four “storylines,” Mexican-American Journeys about immigration experiences, and The Memorial Day Massacre, about a key 1937 labor event, are currently complete and accessible on the site. Another storyline, The Closing of the Mills, launches June 30, 2023, and From Wetlands to Waste, about contemporary environmental activism around industrial pollution, will launch in December 2023.

SECASP Project Director Chris Walley is an anthropologist who grew up in a steelworking family in Southeast Chicago and has published widely about the region. Walley and SECASP Co-Director Chris Boebel, a filmmaker, previously made a documentary feature, Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story (2017; http://exitzeroproject.org), about the closing of the mills. Web artist Jeff Soyk is Creative Director of SECASP. Rod Sellers is Director of the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum. SECASP won the 2022 Studs Terkel Prize for Media and Journalism from the Working-Class Studies Association and an honorable mention for the 2022 New Directions Award from the American Anthropological Association.