Transmedia Collage: Histories of Violence and Futures of Health on Chicago’s South Side is a project that explores how a climate of structural violence has impacted the health and wellbeing of black and brown teens and the communities they live in on Chicago’s South Side.

The third issue of thresholds will be a digital installation of the Transmedia Collage, a collaboration between the University of Chicago’s Transmedia Story Lab, an initiative that explores how emergent digital media can include youth of color, influence broader publics, and improve health, and the UIC's History Moves, a project geared toward producing community-engaged public history through History and Design.

Transmedia Collage combines oral history with speculative design methods to address the past, present, and future of the city of Chicago, with a particular focus on South Side neighborhoods such as Englewood, Greater Grand Crossing, North Lawndale, Washington Park, and Woodlawn. To design this issue, we the editors of thresholds are joining the vast, collaborative team of the Transmedia Collage project, which includes artists, historians, literary and media theorists, journalists, storytellers, graphic designers, and, in its first year, fourteen teenagers. Over the past year, this group engaged with historical archives and the oral testimony of participating elders to create new narratives about the city of Chicago. Operating at the thresholds of humanistic disciplines and artistic practices, this project seeks to influence research, policy, and public discourse about Chicago’s past, present, and future.

Editors/designers: Ireashia Bennett (lead), with Whitney Trettien, Patrick Jagoda, and Frances McDonald

Forthcomingissue #3: transmedia collage