Texas After Violence Project is a public memory archive that fosters deeper understandings of the impacts of state violence. Our mission is to help build power with directly impacted communities, centering their dignity, agency, and expertise to cultivate restorative and transformative justice.
Our vision is a culture of care that addresses and prevents violence without compounding harm and trauma. A culture that centers the needs of victims, survivors, and their loved ones through community-based accountability and healing. Where family and community relationships that have been torn apart by the carceral state have been mended.
We document the voices, experiences, and perspectives of people directly impacted by violence in Texas. Our After Violence Archives holds hundreds of hours of interviews with people directly impacted by violence, murder, police violence, in-custody deaths, mass incarceration, and the death penalty. We preserve stories and materials that are often ignored by institutional archives and silenced by dominant narratives about violence.
We offer workshops on many aspects of memory work after violence, including trauma-informed interviewing, community archiving, and planning community-based projects. From guidance on ethically documenting protests to trainings on working in clinical settings with people directly impacted by the death penalty, we create resources that center liberatory memory work, community collaboration, and abolitionist practice.
We invite storytellers, artists, activists, organizers, and writers to work with our archives. From our Visions After Violence Community Fellowships to our Home Fire digital publication on liberatory memory work and transformative justice, we encourage the public to engage creatively and expansively with difficult questions about violence, accountability, and justice.
Following the lead of people directly impacted by state violence, we fight for decarceration and abolition, and work to disrupt relentless cycles of violence and trauma. From our Life and Death in a Carceral State storytelling project to our Access to Treatment initiative, we center the voices and experiences of our communities in our advocacy for transformative justice.
AVA was created in 2021 with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It serves as an online repository for materials (interviews, correspondence, art, and other items) documenting state-sanctioned violence in the United States. The After Violence Archive also contains materials from our partner collections, the Forced Trajectory Project and the Inside Books Project Archive.
© 2023 | Texas After Violence Project
