The After Violence Archive contains materials from our Sheltering Justice collection, which includes this letter, mask, and soap sent to us by Celeste Johnson from the prison unit where she’s incarcerated.
With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we’re thrilled to formally announce the launch of the After Violence Archive, our new home for the Texas After Violence digital collections. AVA utilizes Mukurtu, an open-source content management system created with indigenous communities “to manage, share, and exchange their cultural heritage in ethically minded ways.” On AVA, you can explore oral history interviews, digitized materials sent to TAVP and partner collections like the Inside Books Project, and browse our collections by categories, keywords, communities and more. In coming months, we’ll continue to upload interviews old and new, as well as more materials from our partners.
We created the After Violence Archive – a space that we hope will be welcoming and accessible to all – because we are a community-based archive, with collections that document the stories of individuals who have been directly impacted by state violence. In AVA, we have control over how our collections are presented, who receives access to each digital heritage item, and how each item links with other items and stories in our collections. Mukurtu is designed to be community first, which means we have been able to build a site to suit our needs and the needs of our partner collections and users beyond academics and researchers. We are beginning to understand access as a spectrum, and we want to provide as many points along that spectrum as possible.
We’ve given a lot of thought to how we preserve and present our archives. In addition to thinking about this within TAVP, we’ve participated in public discussions as well. In 2018, TAVP was part of Architecting Sustainable Futures in New Orleans, organized by Bergis Jules, where community-based archives gathered to discuss long-term sustainability. In an accompanying post for the Sustainable Futures blog, Samip Mallick wrote about the question of precarity for community-based archives. His post ends with a question: “How precarious is it to steward collections representing communities of color in predominantly white institutions in our current white supremacist neoliberal climate? The past decade of working on SAADA has shown us that true sustainability is built from within rather than without the community we serve and represent.” AVA is our effort to build true sustainability for TAVP and our partner collections.
To discover more about the process that led to AVA’s creation, you can read TAVP Director of Archives Jane Field’s essay here. Jane’s essay is the first of what we hope will be several about the After Violence Archive — we’ll be talking more about how to use Mukurtu, new highlights from our collections, and the process behind its development.
If you’re interested in using the After Violence Archive in a classroom or other educational setting, and would like to learn more about it, please feel free to reach out to archive@texasafterviolence.org with any questions or requests.
