Campus-Community Collaborations and Public Environmental Humanities on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia

Abstract The tidal Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, USA, presents a waterscape at once singular and uniquely local while also typical of a novel ecosystem. Heavy with centuries of legacy pollutants from coal and oil refining, the river water presents a liquid archive with few finding aids, catalogs, or guides. Propelled by a fundamental paradox (if “wisdom sits in places,” how do we know “forgotten places”), this article considers a series of collaborative learning experiments animated by insights from academic and community researchers about Black ecologies. It traces a series of public environmental humanities experiments undertaken over a five-year period in and with the river’s historic wetlands and their various communities. Sharing insights from insurgent learning practices, the article aims to further the environmental humanities’ transformational premise and promise to envision and foster more just futures. As we, academic researchers, have learned with and from community partners, we have sought to make mutually beneficial work, including much that hardly resembles conventional academic outcomes. A “living” digital river archive offers a compendium to the article.