Overview - Listening for a Change

The Texas After Violence Project is an independent oral history and human rights organization that seeks justice, social change, and an end to violence. We conduct qualitative research, share our findings, and promote constructive conversations. We do not not, ourselves, lobby or litigate for changes in the law and we do not advocate for individual people. Rather, we listen for a change.

We listen to the first-person narratives of people who have been directly touched by serious violence, investigatory or legal processes, incarceration, or state executions. Sharing these stories of lived experience, we foster critical, constructive conversations about the most effective ways to both prevent and respond to violence.

Why stories? Debates or lectures about quantitative data are not particularly effective at promoting dialogue: participants gird themselves with ideological armor and “facts.” By contrast, when people speak in the first person describing their own lives, spaces open for conversation. Out of these conversations, we believe, will come solutions from the ground up.

Important features of the Texas After Violence Project

1) We listen to and record the stories of people with a wide range of experiences, regardless of their opinions or beliefs: family members of murder victims, family members of executed persons, clergy and spiritual advisors, law enforcement officers, victims services counselors, defense and appellate lawyers, prosecutors including elected District Attorneys, judges and jurors, formerly incarcerated persons, media witnesses to executions, and others. Thus far we have conducted about one hundred interviews.

2) Ethics, ethics, and ethics. We begin with the Code of Conduct, but do not stop there. We ask what are our ethical responsibilities to people in each role: narrators, interviewers, videotraphers, people named in oral history interviewers who may not have the opportunity to tell their own versions of events, or who may be harmed in tangible or intangible ways? What are our responsibilities to "the truth" or different truths; is withholding of narratives or portions of narratives once donated ever legitimate, desirable, or necessary? What are the ethics of providing access? Is censorship always an unwarranted intrusion and act of control over other peoples' stories? Do we owe responsibilities to audiences and future audiences; and if so, what are those responsibilities? Should or must we always use categories with which users may be most familiar, or are we justified in employing other categories that may "push" users to think in alternative ways? Or perhaps we are even obligated to change categories in a quest to challenge current divisive thinking and in pursuit of social justice? (For instance, should family members of people who died because of the deliberate actions of other people all be in the same category? Or should we divide family members into categories such as "family members of murder victims" and "family members of executed persons" and "family members of people who died at the hands of law enforcement?" Should we ever index narrators by gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, nationality, "race," ethnicity, age, income, work or profession, national origin? If so, under what circumstances and why?

3) Process is more important than "products."

4) We unapologetically focus on the here and now: events, practices, and processes for which we, as Texans and Tejana/os, bear great responsibility. You need not go to the Balkans, Burma, Burundi, or Brazil to be a human rights activist or scholar!! We think and study in global terms, but we work locally. Thus far we have conducted interviews in McLennan, Tarrant, Burleson, Potter, Travis, Bexar, Harris, Houston, Montgomery, Walker, Nueces, Cameron, and Hidalgo Counties. We take Texas history seriously and we do not take anything for granted; we certainly do not settle for clichés or glib rejoinders to questions about how or why Texas differs from neighboring states or other parts of the U.S. We ask questions like: Why Texas? Why Callin County? Why Webb County? What happened in the 1970s in Harris County, and what has changed?

5) Transparency. We strive to make our methods -- and mistakes -- as obvious as possible so that researchers and groups viewing or reading the interviews may take our assumptions, biases, idiosyncracies, missed cues, and methodology into account. We do not "clean up" the raw interviews except as interview narrators discuss or, cautiously and reluctantly at times, as we deem necessary for compelling ethical reasons. We want everyone to see our "bloopers" and hope that oral historians and other people will learn from what we do well and what we do not so well --- or just learn that everything "is what it is" and that our lenses serve some purposes and not others. We hope that people with tell us what they think: info@texasafterviolence.org

6) Self-reflection is key.

7) We are interdisciplinary.

8) The Texas After Violence Project partners with the Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) of the University of Texas Libraries, to make the oral history interviews we co-create with narrators widely accessible both as videos and as transcripts. We are not creating a print publication, but using cutting-edge technology to make oral history videos and transcripts available to anyone who has access to the internet, whether personally or through a public or school library.

9) Synergy. We work on specific, clearly defined, and limited human rights and social justice projects with community organizations with which we have well-established relationships.

10) Mentoring, training, intergenerational collaboration, and leadership development characterize our project.

- We provide extensive training and opportunity for each volunteer and intern, addressing ethical issues, self-care, approaches to interviewing, technical camera and computer issues, history, law, racism, archival work, the importance of self-reflection, grief, and mourning.

- Volunteers and interns perform substantive and meaningful work. We expect every person to spend about 1/3 of her or his time in (always ongoing) training; 1/3 of her or his time on work that benefits the project generally (such as transcribing or indexing interviews); and 1/3 of his or her time focusing on a project of particular interest. For example, one intern chose to focus on violence against transgender people, another on violence against immigrants, and another on legal interviews.

- We encourage our team members to study.

- We look for opportunities for public speaking, external trainings, and field trips.

- We very strongly encourage self care.