UT Collections
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The Free Burma Rangers (FBR) is a multi-ethnic humanitarian service movement. Ethnic pro-democracy groups send teams to be trained, supplied and sent into the Burma areas under attack to provide emergency assistance and human rights documentation. The Free Burma Rangers Collection features documentary and advocacy videos produced from FBR's humanitarian mission footage. Videos are in regional Burmese languages with English subtitles and translations.
2003-2007 -
The Genocide Archive of Rwanda (GAR) features video testimonies from genocide survivors, video recordings of the Gacaca Court proceedings and remembrance ceremonies, photographs, and archival documents that provide context to the history of the 1994 Genocide. Materials are in Kinyarwanda. Select videos have English subtitles and translations and French translations. Select archival materials have abstracts in English and French. GAR is a collaborative project of the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, Aegis Trust, and Rwanda’s National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide.
1987-2007 -
This collection contains video footage shot by WITNESS partner Jesús Tecú Osorio, an activist and survivor of the March 13, 1982 massacre in which 177 Mayan-Achi women and children in Río Negro, Rabinal were tortured, raped, and slaughtered by the Guatemalan army and army-led civil patrol groups. Río Negro was one of the 440 villages that were razed and destroyed during the Guatemalan government's counter-insurgency campaign. This collection includes recorded interviews and footage from the Rabinal area of exhumations, memorial ceremonies and re-burials, political actions against amnesty for those responsible for the killings, gatherings of former civil patrollers, and legal proceedings against former civil patrollers involved in the massacres. There is also footage of various indigenous Maya Achí rituals and performances. This collection includes two WITNESS co-productions, A Right to Justice and A Massacre Remembered. Materials are in English, Spanish, and Achí.
1996-2002, undated -
“Operation Fine Girl: Rape Used As a Weapon of War in Sierra Leone” looks at the widespread and strategic use of rape and sexual violence against women – many of them young girls and teenagers – during the decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone, the world’s poorest country. “Operation Fine Girl” was produced by and for the Oxygen network's Worth The Risk series, in partnership with WITNESS, who put together Binta Mansaray, their local partner in Sierra Leone, and Academy Award-nominated director Lilibet Foster to make the documentary. The collection includes interviews with victims of sexual violence; interviews with medical, legal, and other professionals; footage of political figures; footage of ceremonies, parades, commemoration events, campaign events, and other events; and raw footage of daily life in Sierra Leone. The collection also includes the finished documentary in English and Krio, as well as an excerpted version in English. Materials are in English and Krio.
2001-2002, undated -
The Rethinking Power and Resistance: Gender and Human Rights from Texas to the Transnational Americas Conference Footage collection contains edited footage from the 2012 conference, including several panel discussions, a radio segment aired on KOOP 91.7 fm, and a post-conference promotional video produced by Andrea Zarate. The conference was sponsored by the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Texas at Austin as part of its Embrey Women’s Human Rights Initiative. The Rethinking Power & Resistance organizing committee envisioned a conference that would bring organizers and activist scholars together and foment collaborative work beyond the conference. As such, the conference centered around three community-university collaborations with the Transgender Jail Project, Conspire Theatre, and the Polochic Evictions Counteraction and foregrounded the themes of arts as advocacy, pedagogies of alliance and resisting criminalization. Videos are in English, Spanish and Portuguese, with some videos featuring consecutive translation into English.
Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, Gender and Sexuality, Immigrant Rights, Indigenous Rights, Prisoner Rights2012-2013 -
Houston-based commercial litigation lawyer, Scott J. Atlas, collected the materials that comprise this collection through his pro bono work as a defense attorney for the capital murder trial of Ricardo Aldape Guerra. Guerra was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico wrongfully held on Texas Death Row for fifteen years before being exonerated in 1997. In 1982, twenty-year-old Guerra was arrested and indicted for the capital murder of Houston police officer J.D. Harris, despite all physical evidence pointing to Roberto Carrasco Flores as the one who shot and killed Officer Harris. Harris County prosecutors appealed to heightened anti-Mexican immigrant hostility in Houston by repeatedly emphasizing Guerra's undocumented immigration status to the jury in order to help secure his conviction and death sentence. After being released in 1997, Guerra returned to Mexico a national hero for overcoming what many Mexicans thought to be an unjust Texas legal system intent on punishing undocumented Mexican immigrants. The Scott J. Atlas Collection of Legal Materials on the Ricardo Aldape Guerra Case consists of digitized copies of all Atlas' related case files as well as audiovisual recordings of press coverage of the Aldape case. All the digitized case files are available for viewing online.
1982-2005 -
Tejiendo la Memoria is a weekly radio program produced by the Museo de la Palabra y la Image / Museum of the Word and Image (MUPI). Each program is between five and seven minutes and relates an aspect of the social, cultural, or political history of El Salvador. The program was originally broadcast by the news program, Voces en Contacto, by the Association of Participatory Radio and Programs of El Salvador (ARPAS). The program currently airs on Conexión Comunitaria.
Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, Ethnic Conflict and Genocide, Gender and Sexuality, Indigenous Rights, War Crimes2009-present -
The Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) is an independent, Austin-based, nonprofit organization. TAVP’s oral history archive documents the effects of murder and capital punishment in Texas and aims to serve as a resource for public dialogue on alternative ways to prevent and respond to violence. The TAVP collection includes video testimonies and transcripts from survivors of violence; religious actors; law enforcement officials; legal actors; media witnesses; and activists and scholars.
Civil Rights, Segregation, and Apartheid, Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, Gender and Sexuality, Prisoner Rights2008-present
