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 graduate of Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts and Barnard College (Class of 2020) where she studied economic history and black feminist theory. 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

How can we build more expansive and rigorous frameworks for imagining sustainable, loving, and liberatory futures? Taylor Thompson believes one strategy is learning to listen to each-other’s dreams with a deliberate, embodied practice. In the online oral history exhibit “Tell Me About That World: Speculative Archives + Black Feminist Listening Practices” Taylor interviews community care organizers in NYC about the worlds they hope to usher in through their organizing; she then presents a small speculative archive mixtape of those conversations.

Practice 

To accompany the mixtape, Taylor develops a guided listening practice, staked in black feminist tradition, with which to engage the interviews. The listening practice encourages practitioners to constellate the dreams of the narrators as well as their own dreams in order to hone an acute understanding of where and when, why and how, and at what cost those dreams interface with one another. As she writes in the central essay “Towards a Black Feminist Listening Practice,” “this is a blueprint for being in critical and loving relation to one another in our dreaming.”