OVERVIEW: Chicago Studies is excited to announce a new CIV Core offering that mirrors the University's Study Abroad programs right here in Chicago. Each 3-class Chicago CIV sequence takes place within a single quarter, allowing students to fulfill their entire CIV requirement all at once without studying abroad.
Now accepting "Early Decision" applications for our Spring 2026 sequence on the Calumet region! (Google form - see details below)
These immersive sequences, each of which focuses on a particular theme or region or community within the city, promote critical reflection with the city of Chicago, encouraging civic literacy and cultural humility through contact, acculturation, and high-impact teaching and learning approaches. All Chicago CIV sequences utilize field trips, guest speakers, community engagement, and undergraduate research to enrich course readings and assignments. Each sequence serves not only as an introduction to Chicago but also to methodologies for urban studies in the social sciences and humanities. Students will be expected to carry out a project that traces through each of the courses and that results in a cumulative, final product that will be assessed at the end of the quarter.
Membership in each cohort is determined by application; accepted students will be enrolled in all three classes of the sequence. (There is not an option to take only two of the three inter-related classes, but students may choose to count each course toward a different requirement, e.g. counting two classes toward CIV and one towards major/minor elective requirements, or applying all three courses to major/minor requirements if they've already fulfilled CIV elsewhere.) Students who complete the Chicago Studies CIV sequence also fulfill the course requirements for the College’s interdisciplinary Certificate in Chicago Studies.
In general, Chicago CIV classes will meet intensively on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons (see specific quarter information for additional details), with Fridays devoted to required experiential learning outings throughout Chicagoland. Students who wish to take an additional class during the Chicago CIV term may only register for a class that meets M-Th before 2 PM or in the evening.
Recent and Upcoming Chicago CIV Themes
The three courses that comprise the Spring 2025 sequence provide students with deep knowledge of how Latin(e/x) Americans have transformed and experienced Chicago. “Latin America in/at Chicago” examines hemispheric social, political, and intellectual connections in the city over the long twentieth century. “Immigrant Chicago” homes in on the specific experiences of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Venezuelans to convey the diversity of Latine/x Chicago and historicize the contemporary reality of immigration from different regions of the Americas. The final course in the bundle, “Latinx Arts in Chicago,” examines artistic production as creative responses to the lived realities of Latinx populations in the city. See images from the 2025 quarter here.
The Calumet quarter focuses on the dynamic region hugging the shores of Lake Michigan to south and east of Chicago whose natural and human history are inextricably bound up with the city’s. The sequence integrates perspectives from ecology, humanities, and social sciences, and focuses on “the power of place.” Through a concatenation of cultural practices, social relations and economic processes—all within the indomitable crucible of nature—people don’t just create places, they produce vastly different sorts of places: urban and rural, towns, cities, neighborhoods and villages and their myriad interconnections. The communities of the Calumet transformed rugged prairies and wetlands into spaces for production, residence, and community development, much of it in service to the rapacious needs of the industrial metropolis just to its north and of the people who profited from its control over resource and capital flows. Those communities, in turn, were changed again as a globalizing economy moved production elsewhere, leaving them to reinvent themselves and reinterpret their industrial and cultural heritage.
In the CIV Core, we study places because of their intrinsic interest but perhaps more importantly, we study places to learn what it means to be human. Through these three linked courses, students will take an immersive journey into the very specific historical geography of the Calumet region and, along the way, gain insights and analytical skills relevant to understanding other places: we develop an approach to place and learn its power. Learn more about Chicago CIV: Calumet (including application deadlines and course details) on the CEGU website.
By the end of the 19th century Chicago was the 5th largest city in the world—with much of that growth coming from immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. Immigrants to Chicago found work in factories and created new neighborhoods, but they also faced prejudice, poverty, alienation—and eventually, restrictive quotas limiting their number. Using East European immigration as a case study, this sequence (developed and taught by members of the Russian and Balkan Studies faculty) will examine mass movement to Chicago from the late 19th century to the present. “Where We Come From: Materials and Methods in the Study of Immigration” focuses on the engagement of social workers and the Chicago School of sociology with the great wave of immigration to Chicago that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, preparing students to use archival materials, data mining, and mapping techniques for effective research on past or current immigration. “The Voices of Immigration” investigates the individual experience of immigration: how do immigrants recreate themselves in this alien world in which they seem to lose part of themselves? How do they find their voice and make a place for themselves? How do they remember their origins and record new experiences? And “Spaces of Hope: The City and its Immigrants” applies an urban studies lens to explore the specific and complex histories of immigration to Chicago with close attention to those communities of East European origin. Early decision applications for this sequence will open in Winter 2026.