‘Unsettled Lawrence’ exhibit will reveal history of city’s unhoused, encamped population

LAWRENCE – Perhaps Lawrence’s most divisive issue involves the treatment of the unhoused. One side says such individuals are a danger and drain to the city. The other says they are deserving of sympathy and support.

But a new exhibit demonstrates that the unhoused are a key component of the Lawrence community … and have been for centuries.

“I don’t think it’s a surprise to anybody that Lawrence has been developed unevenly, and many spaces remain places of alternative settlement,” said Rachel Schwaller, a University of Kansas lecturer in the departments of History and Religious Studies.

“While these residents have long been marginalized in the memory of our collective past, it’s important to recognize how they have lived.”

A new exhibition based on her research titled “Unsettled Lawrence” focuses on how unhoused and encamped individuals in Lawrence’s past and present have formed a diverse community. It opens Aug. 7 and runs through February 2027 at the Watkins Museum of History, 1047 Massachusetts St. 

Co-created by Molly Adams, who recently earned her master’s degree in Indigenous studies at KU, the project offers a combination of oral history, artwork and co-participant documentary photography. The goal is to showcase the amount of knowledge, skill and creativity it takes to build a sustainable campsite in the Lawrence community, the researchers said, and they hope it shifts perspectives by framing unsettlement as a key part of the city’s history.

“I selected the title ‘Unsettled Lawrence’ because the exhibit centers on questioning the idea of settlement itself, and there are groups of people that most societies have considered to be not settled or settled wrongly. Unsettled really challenges the idea that Lawrence was ever a settled place at all,” Schwaller said. 

She described this exhibition as “taking seriously the myriads of experiences of unhoused, encamped or precariously housed” in Lawrence. 

“While the city takes this issue seriously, it continues to implement policies that do not take the history of this issue or the everyday lives of people into consideration,” Schwaller said. “The field of history does not always take this population seriously because they are hard to find in the archive ... and because they’re very hard to track because of movement.”

One of the goals of the exhibit is to address what Schwaller considers to be mistaken beliefs involving this subset of the region’s population.

“Some of the biggest misconceptions are that unhoused community members are inherently more immoral, they are more addicted to substances than people who are housed, and housing is under people’s personal control — meaning that if someone wanted to be housed, they could be if they made different choices in their lives. The systematic issues are not often considered,” she said.

She pointed to historical records such as contemporary newspapers, court documents and medical records to support her contention. For instance, the press typically used language that was profoundly racialized and descriptions that were morally judgmental. Additionally, state laws and city/county ordinances frequently provoked this perception.

“The laws used to try to control these populations, particularly vagrancy laws, are highly subjective moral laws. They’re based on perceived idleness or on gender. So if a woman is out walking past 9 p.m. in Lawrence, she could have been arrested for vagrancy in the early 1900s,” Schwaller said.

Attendees of the exhibit can expect to see iPad kiosks in which people can enter into the East Bottoms of Lawrence to look at digital maps of where settlements and events occurred and how they were described by newspapers. They’ll be able to see story maps of famous and infamous individuals in Lawrence’s history. 

For the modern part of the exhibit, there’ll be a bike sculpture, a wall painted by members of the unhoused community and recent photos of encampments.

“I’m most excited about the wall,” Schwaller said. “We did an art exhibit for KU’s digital storytelling project Stories for All, and as part of our art exhibit, people sign the art that they do. It was really thrilling to have people who were formerly encamped here in Lawrence and are now housed, as well as a couple members of the current unhoused community, come and leave their mark.”

Schwaller (who publishes under the name Rachel E C Beckley) has been a KU faculty member since 2021. Specializing in U.S. evangelicalism, she said that the language of settlement is heavily influenced by religious perspectives. 

“One of the things that struck me so much when I mapped out the newspaper language — especially from the East Bottoms — is that the historic places that were considered to be notorious are where modern encampments still are,” she said. “It maps right onto it. That is very telling how the places deemed peripheral, liminal, criminal and immoral continue to be places of poverty today.”

More information on the exhibition can be found on the “Unsettled Lawrence” webpage.