LGBTQIA+ Students and Teachers Co-Creating Oral Histories From the Future That Move People To Action

• In Event: Imagining Liberatory Futures: Pedagogical Resistance in the Past, Present, and Future through Abolitionist Place-Based Methods

Abstract

Over the past three years, Facilitator 4 has been working with LGBTQIA+ student and faculty artists and researchers at LaGuardia Community College to identify, archive, and build liberatory LGBTQIA+ spaces in NYC. Working together as paid members of a research collective meeting weekly, building relationships with important members of our LGBTQIA+ communities, and experimenting with oral histories and photography, we have explored how participatory educational practices can prepare youth and educators to collaboratively play a more active role in both preserving and creating meaningful LGBTQIA+ spaces against the backdrop of racialized gentrification in our own communities.

Inspired by Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O’Brien’s Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 and other visionary fiction that uses freedom dreaming (Kelley, 2002) to imagine and construct more liberatory futures, we began recording oral histories from the future. Students and community narrators described a New York City with unlimited gender-affirming care services open to everyone, including undocumented and houseless youth; free subways without police; a rent-free city. These freedom dreams became the basis for a public exhibition of photographs and oral histories designed to move (Caswell, 2021) policymakers to enact concrete structural changes such as reparations and landmark status for the spaces we work with in New York City.

This workshop builds on these experimental oral history practices to ask participants: What is a system/institution/everyday reality in your community or teaching context that you want to radically transform or abolish? Starting with an embodiment exercise that transports everyone somatically to a liberatory future, participants will eventually record oral histories from the future that help make their freedom dreams concrete and actionable. In our reflection, we will discuss how these experimental practices can be used in and outside classroom walls to tangibly affect policy change.
By envisioning and then sharing these visions collectively, workshop participants will build interdisciplinary solidarities and walk away with concrete experimental models they can use in their own teaching and organizing work.

Author

• Natalie Willens, Graduate Center - CUNY