The Narrators

Our Narrators are leaders in mutual aid and community care organizations across NYC. Community care is not a metaphor, it is a real practice that demands real resources. These narrators have provided us with the opportunity to practice listening towards liberation, and we can give back by aiding them in their liberatory practices as well. Please visit their websites, follow their instagram accounts, and give to their donation sites and Venmo/Cash App accounts to say thank you and support the worlds and survivals they work to (re)produce.

NourishNYC

Queens Liberation Project

Femme Defense Fund

Astoria Mutual Aid

Astoria Food Pantry

Taylor Thompson

Taylor Thompson (she/hers) is a recent graduate of Barnard College of Columbia University (Class of 2020) where she majored in Economics and Social History and minored in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Taylor’s research interests concern Black feminist history and poetics, Black performance studies, the political economy of Black and Indigenous communities, and the economic impacts of neoliberalism and globalization on Communities of Color across the globe. 

Interviews

“Tell Me About That World” is an oral history project exploring the organizing practices, critical political stories, and hoped-for-futures of mutual aid and community care organizers  in New York City. The goal is to ensure that the narratives, strategies, and political dreams of contemporary community care practitioners are preserved and borne witness to with care and respect.

Practice 

The “Speculative Archives + Black Feminist Listening Practices” aspect of the project tends exclusively to the hoped-for-futures of organizers. Why? Because what we imagine for our world(s), for our futures, for our communities matter. How can we build more expansive frameworks for imagining sustainable, caring, and liberatory futures? I asked community care practitioners in NYC about the worlds they hope to build through their organizing and I built a small speculative archive of those conversations. Located in the “Practice” section of the site, you can find 1) a speculative archive of curated clips from the interviews, featuring narratives of hoped-for-futures and 2) an essay/practice towards listening critically to those narratives.