If you are — or know of — a serious UT undergraduate who would like to conduct research this spring, please think about — or recommend checking out — the possibility of working with the Texas After Violence Project, an independent narrative and human rights project,
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See the information below and attachments about UT’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship. Student researchers, interns, and/or volunteers certainly do not have to have a fellowship to work with the Texas After Violence Project, but having a fellowship might be nice!
We have several research projects going on and we provide an eight-week training that is mandatory for researchers. Students can take the training while conducting certain research tasks; only people who have completed the training and have apprenticed (in ways we’ll discuss in detail) will conduct oral history interviews.
As we did last semester, we will run two training series this spring. One will take place on Wednesday evenings on or near the UT Austin campus; the other will take place at the Texas After Violence Project office at 611 South Congress Avenue on Friday afternoons. For detailed information about the trainings, see
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I’ve described five research projects on the College of Liberal Arts (COLA) Undergraduate Research page, here:
Students may work on individual interests within any of these five areas. A student’s project could be a narrow slice within a larger TAVP project. For instance, the Texas After Violence Project looks at the effects of serious violence on people in Texas: a student might wish to study the effects of serious violence on police officers in Texas, or law enforcement officials in the Valley, or jurors in Austin. Or a student could study jail practices with respect to transgender people in a particular region of Texas. On the other hand, a student could not — while working with TAVP — conduct interviews with survivors of violence who are under 18 years of old or who are incarcerated, because we don’t interview people who do not have the ability to consent. Nor could a student work with TAVP to conduct a study of jail policies in Vermont.
You can find these projects in several ways:
Key words search: “social justice” or “human rights” or “Texas”
Sponsor search: Raymond, Virginia
Department search: Center for Mexican American Studies
I have listed these research projects at this COLA site because I am a lecturer with the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) within COLA, and as such received an invitation to post undergraduate research opportunities there. Please note, however, that none of these research projects are sponsored by CMAS or the University of Texas at Austin. I advertise at this site for the same reasons the Texas After Violence Project has previously listed internship opportunities at the Volunteer & Service Learning webpage and that we would be interested in posting at the COLA Career Services page, too (if only they didn’t ask about immigration status!!) — that is, we want to invite serious students to work with us. It is important for you to know that UT does not sponsor the Texas After Violence Project because UT will not award Undergraduate Research Fellowships (URFs) to UT-sponsored projects. As you’ll read on the attached URF Guide, “Research projects should be independent; URFs will not fund UT-sponsored or specific class-associated research or travel (e.g., Study Abroad, seminars, etc.).”
Please write to virginia@texasafterviolence.org if you are a student looking for a faculty supervisor, or a faculty member wishing to sponsor a student researcher hoping to research with TAVP. The proposed supervising faculty member, student researcher, and TAVP director must agree on terms before the student begins. We strongly recommend that the student and proposed supervising faculty member talk to us before submitting an application for a URF. Two years ago a UT undergraduate student and his proposed supervising faculty member submitted an application for a research fellowship, purportedly to conduct research under TAVP’s auspices, without talking to anyone at TAVP first. Although the College of Liberal Arts agreed to fund his application, the student’s proposal was incompatible with TAVP’s strict research protocol about working with “human subjects.” We could have worked with the student and his faculty supervisor to come up with a workable proposal, had they talked to us first. We’re very friendly 
If you have any questions, please call or write Virginia Raymond, Kim Ambrosini-Bacon, or Maurice Chammah at 916-1600 or info@texasafterviolence.org .
