The following was published in UChicago News on December 12, 2024. 

by Tori Lee

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series called UChicago Class Visits, spotlighting transformative classroom experiences and unique learning opportunities offered at UChicago.

On an unusually warm November day, a group of University of Chicago students walked through Jackson Park in Chicago, listening for natural and unnatural sounds. Bird calls were drowned out by crunching gravel, and the hum of cars mixed with rustling leaves. Though the park appeared a natural oasis, it sounded far from bucolic.

This Autumn Quarter, the course “Sensing the Anthropocene” challenged students to engage senses often dulled in the classroom: hearing, touch, taste and smell. Co-taught by UChicago scholars Amber Ginsburg and Jennifer Scappettone, the course took students across Chicago to grapple with how our built urban environment has transformed the natural one.

“The premise of the course is that human beings have radically changed environmental cycles and ecologies—and that we have naturalized this experience. We almost don’t know how to sense it,” said Scappettone, an associate professor in the Department of English with affiliations in Creative Writing, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization.

To get students out of the classroom, and into their own bodies, the course’s instructors sent students wading into Lake Michigan, foraging in Washington Park and riding down the Chicago River. Students were also expected to sketch, write and collage in experimental “daybooks” that doubled as homework assignments, documenting their daily sensorial relationship with the environment.

“The class forced us to really consider how our bodies physically interact with the space around us,” said Emma Zhu, a fourth-year student in the College majoring in Environmental and Urban Studies. “And how we’ve created it.”

Art as research

In the second week of the course, the students got waist deep in Lake Michigan. As the class brought “floating desks” into the water made from found materials gathered throughout the week, waves crashed into them—strengthened by the record-setting hurricane hitting Florida at that very moment.

“We could barely hear each other talk over the waves,” said Henie Zhang, a fourth-year student studying English and Creative Writing. “I was scared going into it, but I’m glad I did it.”

Apart from being outdoors, Zhang was drawn to the course for its experimental methodology and how the topic relates to her thesis, which explores cartography’s relationship to the body.

“I wanted to closely observe how the body moves through and maps itself in open space,” she said, “to pay more attention to the way that I have obligations to the objects around me.”

This mind-body-environment connection was exactly what Ginsburg and Scappettone had in mind when designing the Big Problems course. Both scholars are practicing artists whose work centers around the Anthropocene, a term used to describe the current era of Earth’s history—one defined by humans’ impact on the planet.

Each week, students ventured out into the city to stretch their senses, bolstered by readings, films and art focused on fine-tuning the senses. Out in Chicago’s parks and waterways, the students also met guest lecturers like documentary filmmaker Rebecca Snedeker and artist/counter-cartographer Lize Mogel.

For their main project, students created a daybook inspired by their outdoor observations. Their experimental, multimedia art pieces could include drawing, notes, creative writing and natural treasures found along the way.

Ginsburg hopes the assignment will help students cultivate creative habits, slow down and pay closer attention to the world around them.

“Art practice constitutes a species of research,” Scappettone said. “We’re trying to learn to produce our own methods out of a direct engagement with nature and the built environment.”

Looking for the river

On Halloween, students caught the water taxi at Ping Tom Park in Chinatown, discussing the history of the Chicago River as they made their way up toward the Loop.

As Chicago rapidly industrialized in the 1800s, the river became the city’s dump. The waste traveled into Lake Michigan, contaminating Chicago’s water supply. To mitigate the public health crisis, city engineers accomplished a feat that seemed like science fiction—reversing the flow of the river. The section of the river, connecting the Des Plaines and Chicago Rivers, is officially called the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

During the ride, while passing under bridges filled with cars, the class discussed this blurring of nature and urban infrastructure. The river is a flowing collection of water that, thanks to clean-up efforts, supports over 70 species of wildlife. It also serves as a highway for boats, products and people. During a stop at the Civic Opera Building, Ginsburg pointed out the building’s pumps that draw up water from the river to cool the theater’s auditoriums. Water is also pumped back out, oxygenating the river.

Toward the end of the ride, the sky opened and rain poured down. Several students pulled out watercolor pencils and began sketching in their daybooks.

“I feel very lucky being in nature,” Zhu said. “You really can’t remove yourself from your surroundings, and you can’t remove yourself from your context.”

Listening in the park

In November, students headed to the Garden of the Phoenix, a Japanese garden that sits in the middle of Jackson Park. The garden’s pagoda was originally constructed for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition—one of dozens of rapidly built structures that still shape the city today.

As an exercise, the instructors asked students to map the soundscape of the park. What was the closest sound they heard? The farthest? The softest? The loudest? The natural sounds of birds and lapping water were difficult to hear over construction and traffic. The garden itself is also made of imported materials and plants, carefully sculpted into an oasis.

“We are listening to the sounds of the Obama Center being built and thinking that it is constructed, and that this garden is nature,” Ginsburg said. “But actually, this is as constructed as that is.”

Scappettone hopes students, who major in everything from urban planning to computer science, will take the senses they’ve developed in the course into their other studies. “We know that scientists and even economists and historians—they need to find a language in which to make their ideas relevant,” she said.

Zhang said the course was physically and mentally challenging. It also made her realize just how small she was compared to the environment.

“This class makes you aware of the buzz of things around you,” she said. “Now, part of my learning is feeling myself as an insignificant part in this great symphony. And I think this is just the beginning.”