About this Event
The First Amendment protects our right to assemble. The Listening Tour asks what happens when we do. The First Amendment gives us the right to ask, gather, speak and participate, and the Listening Tour is Queens World's way of actually doing it.
The Listening Tour is why the First Amendment FIlm and Arts festival exists: we wanted to hear more.
Queens Memory is hosting a Queens World Listening Tour Stop to provide space to speak and, just as important, to listen. When we’re overwhelmed with talking for the sake of talking, it’s a relief to just sit, reflect, and listen to each other.
As a community archiving program dedicated to documenting everyday life in the borough, Queens Memory will help connect The Listening Tour’s work of gathering stories with the longer-term work of stewarding community memory. Through a public program centered on the new collection, Queens Memory will invite artists, filmmakers, and community members to reflect on the afterlife of an interview: What happens after a story is recorded? Who preserves it? Who gets to access it? How can storytellers remain accountable to the people and communities whose experiences they document? And how can individual stories become part of a shared historical record that remains accessible to future generations?
The collaboration centers community memory stewardship as an extension of free expression. The freedom to tell a story is inseparable from the opportunity for that story to be heard, preserved and carried forward. By bringing The Listening Tour interviews into the public archive, the partnership recognizes Queens residents not only as interviewees, but as participants in creating and shaping the historical record of their own communities.
Program description
Queens World and Queens Memory invite participants to celebrate our right to assemble. We will gather over breakfast in small groups and respond to prompts inspired by the Queens World Listening Tour, a storytelling initiative about hope and resilience that creates space for people to be seen, heard, and remembered. Listening is how a stronger community is stitched together.
The Queens World Listening Tour will be archived with the Queens Memory Collection at Queens Public Library’s Digital Archives. To learn more about archiving and preserving your stories, please visit queensmemory.org or find us at the event.
Event venue & nearby stays
Sac's Place, 35-11 35th Avenue, Queens, United States
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