Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization
Division of Social Sciences, The University of Chicago

Jennifer Scappettone’s Ecopoetics Core class trawls for macroinvertebrates during biodiversity-oriented water-quality testing in the lagoon adjacent to the Museum of Science and Industry, in collaboration with Mark Hauser of the Friends of the Chicago River, November 2024

Faculty Advisors/Course Instructors: Sol Kim and Mary Beth Pudup

CEGU Exhibitions Team: Jessica Landau, Carlo Diaz, Anna Selden

Material culture is the “stuff” of everyday life and shines a bright light on human experience within with wider processes of economic, environmental, and technological change. Common objects are an entrée to exploring human transformations of the planet and understanding our collective place within the long arc of history. The objects represented in the exhibit can be considered messages to the future that, if unearthed many years hence, will reveal how people in 2025 lived and what they valued.

This exhibitions features student work from the Winter 2025 iteration of CEGU 20003: Global Environmental Change.