praxis

This page is a manual for people who work at the Texas After Violence Project in any capacity (volunteers, board members, interns, and staff). We publish it so that our process is transparent to all potential narrators (people who are telling their stories); potential volunteers, interns, board members, and staff; to people who wish to use the stories in some way and need to know how we work; and to community supporters and donors or potential donors.

Those of you who read or write scholarly articles: consider this page and its links a "methods" section of a paper that is forever in progress.

If you are a person who conducts oral history or ethnographic interviews, or if you work with an organization that does, or if you are just interested, we welcome your questions, suggestions, and thoughts about how you work. Let's compare methods and learn from each other. Write to us at info[at]texasafterviolence[dot]org .

1. Instructions for all staff, volunteers, interns, and board members

understand and follow our code of conduct

think about the ethical responsibilities we owe our narrators, ourselves, third parties mentioned in the narrations, our colleagues, and others

understand your relationship to the interviews, what you can and cannot do with them

strictly adhere to our formal research protocols

commit yourself to self-care

commit yourself to study

follow these office procedures

2. How to identify potential narrators

This section coming soon

3. Instructions for the interview team: interviewer & videographer

listen to and record a person's story

4. Processing the video for the narrator and for transcription

process the video

create the transcript

send the interview DVD and transcript to the narrator

5. Instructions for using interviews AFTER narrators have approved and donated their interviews and made them public

if & when the narrator has reviewed and approved his or her interviews, donated the interview for non-commercial and educational use, agreed that the interview may be public now, and also specifically approved web publication, then and only then you may

select a portion of the interview for posting on the Texas After Violence Project YouTube channel

post the full interview and transcript, along with other Texas After Violence Project interviews, at the Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) of the University of Texas at Austin Libraries

edit clips together

encourage your friends, family, neighbors, co-workers & colleagues, classmates, clergy, teachers and professors, and acquaintances, to watch an interview with you and talk about it

write an annotation

if you don't understand something, please ask!