Texas After Violence is dedicated to the telling, preserving, and sharing of personal experiences of people harmed by the criminal legal system, while always honoring the agency, dignity, and narrative power of every directly impacted person. This work takes many forms, although the core of our archive is video-based oral history interviews. Our archive can be found here.
In 2007, we began collecting oral histories related to the death penalty in Texas. Over the next several years, we spoke with people whose loved ones had been executed by the state, as well as lawyers, jurors, media witnesses, and others who had participated in death penalty cases. In the words of our founder, Walter Long, we hoped this would “foster dialogue between Texans on all sides of the death penalty debate about the human needs revealed in the stories collected.”
As we’ve grown as an organization, our focus has expanded to include other forms of state-sponsored violence, including mass incarceration, in-custody deaths, and police brutality. We believe that it’s impossible to tell the story of the death penalty in Texas without considering it as one form of violence among many within a greater system of retribution and punishment. As journalist and former TAVP staffer Maurice Chammah put it in a March 2021 interview, “having the death penalty as part of the larger criminal justice system, paves the way for what would otherwise seem to be very punitive sentences to seem lenient by comparison.”
We document the resilience and loss of survivors of the carceral system, and the creativity and resourcefulness of those who are working to transform how we address and prevent violence in our communities without perpetrating more violence. We share the stories of those with lived experience of the criminal legal system. We do not impose our own agenda or framework on them but instead honor their experiences and perspectives in all their complexity. Our narrators have all been affected by the criminal legal system, but their experiences and perspectives are myriad and diverse. Some are lawyers and judges, others are formerly incarcerated, many have loved ones who were incarcerated or killed by the state. By documenting and sharing these stories, we are working to redefine and challenge popular notions about violence, accountability, and justice.
Our work takes many forms, and requires the participation of a variety of collaborators and supporters. At the root of our work and mission is our guiding belief that people whose lives have been directly impacted by state violence (including but not limited to police violence, mass incarceration, in-custody abuse and death, immigration enforcement, and the death penalty) not only should have a “seat at the table” but must be key decision-makers at every stage of our work, from project planning to implementation to public activation of our archival materials. To quote our Community Advisor Jennifer Toon, “Sometimes I see people with lived experiences being used as a face, but they have no direct ability to do the work. I am more than my story – I belong in this space for more than just my story.”
In our day-to-day work, we rely on our Community Advisors to use their expertise as people directly harmed by state-sponsored violence to help shape Texas After Violence’s vision and methods. Community advisors attend our weekly team meetings, offer both practical and philosophical insight about our projects and programs, develop content, and suggest areas and issues where we can expand our advocacy.
Our current Community Advisors are Dr. Susannah Bannon and Jennifer Toon.
When devising our longer term goals and developing resources to share our stories with a wider audience in creative ways, we seek the input of our Community Council, which meets quarterly. The Community Council is composed of members who have been part of our oral history process in the past, either as interviewers or narrators, and archivists from our community.
We formed the Community Council in 2021, and shortly after began working with And Also Too, which uses “co-design to create tools for liberation and visionary images of the world we want to live in. Co-design is a collaborative, community-based, consentful practice of designing with people and groups committed to building a more just and beautiful future.” We recently completed our work with And Also Too, and are using the results to create resources based on our archive to engage the public, including people who are currently incarcerated. The Community Council continues to provide feedback and new ideas.
Our current Community Council Members are Lee Greenwood, Lovinah Igbani, and Margarita Luna, Ayshea Khan, and Rachel Winston, as well as TAVP staffers Dr. Susannah Bannon, Murphy Anne Carter, Jane Field, Amy Kamp, and Jennifer Toon.
In much of our oral history work, Texas After Violence staff has conducted the interviews. However, in 2017, we launched Life and Death in a Carceral State, in which we provided training for directly affected people to conduct and record interviews with their fellow community members. Interviewers with lived experience bring unique insight and experience to the work. Our Visions After Violence Community Fellowship Program continues our commitment to centering the experiences, perspectives, and visions of people directly impacted by state violence.
With support from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the 2021-22 Visions After Violence Community Fellowship began in December 2021 and will end in August 2022. Fellows work closely with our staff, the community council, writers/artists in residence, and other collaborators to design and carry out a community-based oral history and archival project. Each fellow will conduct at least 5-10 oral history interviews and will collaborate with the TAVP team to share the stories and other project materials to a broader audience.
The 2022 Visions After Violence Community Fellows are Alexa Garza, Lovinah Igbani-Perkins, and Juania Sueños.
Texas After Violence, in partnership with the UCLA Community Archives Lab and the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), has also received funding from IMLS for a three-year Research in Service to Practice National Leadership Grant to conduct empirical research and develop tools to assess the affective impact of digital technologies on the creation of records documenting minoritized communities by community-based archives. This collaborative project, entitled “Virtual Belonging,” is the next phase of the “Assessing the Use of Community Archives” project completed by Michelle Caswell in 2018, which resulted in several research publications and the creation of a toolkit for community-based archives to collect, analyze, and leverage information about the affective impacts of their work on the communities they serve and represent. By expanding the initial framework to address both the creation of records (rather than just their use) and the impacts of digital technologies (rather than just analog archives), the project scales up Caswell’s initial research and addresses many of the emerging needs of archives, especially the growing recognition of the need to mitigate potential harms for record creators and users, and the growing dependence on digital technologies across the archives, museum, and LIS fields in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
© 2023 | Texas After Violence Project