SWAN student Erin Stanley published in Riverwise

Erin Stanley, a student in the Social Work and Anthropology (SWAN) Ph.D. program was recently published in the Winter edition of the Riverwise Magazine. Below you will find the intro to the article "(Re)membering Home, Demolition in Detroit as Dismemberment", read the full publication on the Riverwise website.

"Alive

I learned that my place is alive despite the messaging that land is property, and the world is a machine,

Learned it was suffering before I knew the terms racism, segregation, and poverty,

Learned it had the power to shape a life, the willingness to teach, the call to nurture.

Disease

I saw my place get sick long before my parents found the yellow bag on our front door,

Saw houses that tell stories, create memories, and yearn for care described in the news as vacant, abandoned, blighted,

Saw symptoms of an epidemic, yet saw it misdiagnosed as our failure, our choice, our neglect.

Death

I heard the bulldozer rip through my place long ago, one Christmas Eve, then again, and again, and again.

Heard walls that once held photographs and bricks that once offered security carelessly dismantled and thrown in a dumpster,

Heard the unmarked graves filled with soil; heard some people cheer and some mourn; heard the politicians take credit for this erasure.

Recovery

We heal our place as we heal our wounds- our chronic aches from colonization and industrialization, our recurrent bleeding from white supremacy, capitalist extraction, and class warfare, and our acute pains of degradation, dispossession, disavowal.

Heal as witnesses, co-liberators, future-ancestors, and members of one another.

Heal through belonging in place- in its beauty, its brokenness, its promise."

- Erin Stanley