Emplace is a peer-reviewed, digital storytelling platform for faculty, students, and community partners to tell the stories that matter in their community and to build supportive coalitions across the nation. In 2022, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville enrolled its first class of twenty-five CODE Scholars. CODE Scholars collaborate with community partners with the goal of creating a more socially just world. They study and address global problems in a local context and share their work using digital tools and methods. With support from the Mellon Foundation, CODES has expanded to including 100 new students each year, and we are poised to share our model of community-engaged, place-based learning with other regional universities.
Emplace is a site for community building that keeps stories rooted deeply in place while also allowing for cross-pollination and connection among the institutions and communities who launch their own CODES programs. Stories have the power to create change. Emplace explores how community engagement initiatives can work toward what Edward Soja calls “spatial justice.” When communities lack access to basic services, bear the brunt of environmental pollutants, or become defined by surrounding inequities, spatial injustice occurs. CODES cohorts have engaged in this work by humanizing data, building reparative justice maps, and using their digital creations to articulate how St. Louis’s issues are situated in a global context. As CODES expands, we will curate thematic content so contributors and audiences in, for example, Fairbanks, Alaska, can see how conversations about repatriation and reparations in St. Louis’s African American communities compare with issues facing Alaskan Natives.
Emplace centers placemaking as an active practice. Literally “to fix in place,” the term emplace evokes intentionality, care, and action in relation to our communities. Emplace is a community-based, platform that elevate the stories of joy and resistance that arise in and across communities. Emplace supports its student and community contributors with developmental editing and community-based review, creating a genre of public scholarship that values the works of diverse contributors. The interactive story genres on Emplace include data visualization, video production, podcasting, mapping, graphic networks, and scrollytelling, a technique that dynamically reveals multimedia content as a reader scrolls through a narrative. Content from the platform will be used in courses to seed new ideas and perspectives, ensuring it a growing user base.