Through a participatory process that included workshops, collaborative working sessions, the use of specially designed history-making toolkits and plenty of candid dialogue, the History Moves team worked with the women of WIHS Chicago to create their own chapter in the history of Chicago. The women worked in pairs to interview one another, producing stories of staggering heartbreak and courage, tremendous loss and pain, and incomparable tales of redemption, determination, and spirit. Ultimately, these overlapping personal narratives produce a collage of all forms of social inequities and injustices—a mosaic of recent and contemporary urban life. With the individual oral histories as a guide, we then worked with the women to collect visual materials—photos, documents, hand-written stories and poems—to accompany their words.
