EmplaceSTL is a peer-reviewed platform to share the stories of joy and resilience that define the St. Louis region.
Emplace is hosted at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and stems from the perspective that all universities have a commitment to partner with members of the communities where they reside and on which they depend.
SIUE is a regional comprehensive university situated within a landscape that in the nineteenth century was called Looking Glass Prairie because of the grandeur of its expanse of undulating wetlands and grasslands. Its prairies were significantly altered by settlement, colonization, and industrial agriculture. For this reason, Emplace, takes its inspiration from Emily Dickinson’s poem 1755:
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.[1]
In Dickinson’s poem, something as small as a bee uses its connection to place to pollinate a transformation—one clover into a prairie. Dickinson tells us that an act of revery, of imagination, can enliven the same intentional change.
Emplace centers placemaking through storytelling as a creative practice. The term emplace evokes intentionality, care, and action in relation to the work of strengthening communities through sharing local stories. Stories have the power to create change. Stories shape who we are, how we understand the world around us, and how we imagine the future. Through storytelling, Emplace advocates for spatial justice, in which people have access to healthy living environments, equal access to resources and services, and the ability to contribute to the identity and future of their homes.
We welcome contributions from community members, local organizations, students, and faculty. Emplace supports its 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 is also used in college courses to seed new ideas and perspectives, ensuring Emplace a growing user base.
Our Roots in CODES
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville has had a commitment to community-engagement since its founding. To expand on this commitment in a transformative way, in 2017 a team of faculty in SIUE’S IRIS Center for Digital Humanities, including Dr. Jessica DeSpain, Dr. Connie Frey Spurlock, Dr. Kristine Hildebrandt, Dr. Howard Rambsy, Dr. Jessica Harris, and Dr. Michael Hankins began planning what would eventually become Community-Oriented Digital Engagements Scholars (CODES). CODES is a selective program, offering full tuition for students who are among the first generation in their family to attend college, who are historically underrepresented in their major, or who are Pell-eligible. From their first semester, 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. 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. SIUE enrolled its first class of twenty-five CODE Scholars in 2022, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. A $1,000,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation allowed the University to expand CODES to 100 students per year starting in 2025.
As a part of the expansion, DeSpain and IRIS Center Director Margaret Smith realized CODES needed better platforms to document and share the work of CODE Scholars alongside the stories of community members and partner organizations. Emplace is also a site for learning more about the CODES curriculum, how to seed some version of CODES at other institutions, and how to foster community partnerships.
In our first year, we begin with stories of the St. Louis region, contributing to a long tradition of place-based storytelling in the St. Louis region: mapping projects like We Are St. Louis (University of Missouri-St. Louis), critical engagements with local data like The Engaged City (Washington University), and youth digital storytelling projects like Digital East St. Louis and Conversation Toward a Brighter Future 2.0 (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville). As CODES expands to other institutions, our hope is that stories tied to a single place can foster coalitions, comparisons, and commiserations making stories of the hyperlocal have national reverberations.
[1] The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998.