Our Manifesto

Five years into the COVID pandemic, Chicago’s COVID-conscious community continues to organize for disability justice and build decolonial, anti-racist, and feminist solidarities. Now is the time to document and preserve these efforts. 2024 saw the introduction of masking ban proposals in the City of Chicago and city and state governments across the country. Such proposals reflect the state’s project of organized abandonment. All of our struggles against state cruelty and violence are connected. 

The Chronicling Care Oral History Project follows the tradition of the radical community archives founded by queer organizers in the 1970s and 1980s. Projects like the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives here in Chicago and the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York have shown us how to use oral histories to affirm the existence of our community and to struggle for its future. More recent projects like the National Public Housing Museum’s Oral History Archive & Corps, the Southeast Chicago Archive & Storytelling Project, and the UIC Chicago History Corps’s Covid Conversations illustrate how community history efforts contribute to the continuation of radical politics and coalition-building in Chicago. Finally, disability storytelling projects like Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility Project remind us of the power of operating from the disability justice maxim first proclaimed by the South African disability rights movement: “Nothing about us without us.”

Collecting and preserving our experiences of organizing for the health, safety, and flourishing of our communities is nothing short of a radical act. To enter our stories into a living archive is to call our community’s past, present, and future into being. Building this repository of stories out of our shared skills, experiences, and dreams is a form of care work. Together, we can share knowledge and learn from the setbacks and failures of the past several years of organizing against eugenics and ableism. We can connect our struggles to ancestors and movements past. We can strategize for ever-more accessible and liberatory action. We can learn to accompany each other through the pain, grief, and isolation we’ve been forced to individualize. 

The Chronicling Care Oral History Project aims to cultivate and sustain the interdependence of Chicago’s growing webs of COVID-conscious community. Our efforts to generate collective memory through ethically informed oral history practices are life-affirming. They are also future-oriented. We are proclaiming our belief in and commitment to a more livable and just future, and we are offering future generations a tangible record of our struggle. We will build this living archive with each other and for each other. As storytellers and storykeepers, we will document our communities’ struggles and dream and demand our futures.