On the Horizon

Zohour, a narrator from the Resettled project, and her family

VOW’s education and community partnership work with How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America will continue throughout the year, with additional virtual events and our Sharing History Initiative, which will provide book sets of How We Go Home to underresourced classrooms and communities around the United States and Canada.

The Unheard Voices of the Pandemic booklet release is set for this summer, and Mi María: Surviving the Storm will be released on September 14 through our publishing partner Haymarket Books.

Voice of Witness is also offering an online workshop series this June, with interactive sessions focused on building skills related to oral history storytelling.

We continue to incubate new books through the VOW Story Lab program, a unique opportunity for storytellers working in the field of human rights to receive holistic support for oral history projects, along with training, editorial guidance, and funding. Select Story Lab Fellows will be awarded VOW Book Fellowships to support the full development of their project into a VOW book.

Currently in our Story Lab is From Incarceration to Reentry, a project on life after incarceration that seeks to illuminate the process of reentry in the Bay Area — a bastion of progressivism weighed down by income inequality and punitive policing. After years or decades of imprisonment, the formerly incarcerated are released into the most expensive rental market in the country often with no money, no savings, and very little structural support.

There is a significant absence of literature and scholarship on reentry that places the lived experiences of those most affected at the very center. Coeditors Reggie Daniels and Ion Vlad explore with narrators from across the Bay Area their complex and nuanced experiences of reentry, the specter of recidivism, and life on parole.

As we look a bit further down the road, our education work and community partnerships will center around themes of resettlement and algorithmic injustices, the topics of our forthcoming books:

2023 - Resettled: Beginning (Again) in Appalachia2023 - Resettled: Beginning (Again) in Appalachia Edited by Katrina Powell Edited by Katrina Powell

People living in and moving to rural Appalachia embody diverse experiences and cultures. Whether someone has lived in the region a short time or for generations, journeys of resettlement in Appalachia are complex. Resettled: Narratives of Beginning (Again) in Appalachia tells seldom-heard stories of displacement, trauma, and community integration in an area not generally known for its resettlement efforts. The first-person stories in this book counter monolithic representations of rural Appalachia as a place of poverty and strife, and of resettled populations as draining resources.

With a focus on shared resettlement experiences, this project places narratives of migrants, refugees, and generations-long residents alongside one another as all Appalachian to examine the benefits and challenges of being newcomers in and welcoming new neighbors to the region.

2024 - Living in the Digital Welfare State2024 - Living in the Digital Welfare State Coedited by Virginia Eubanks and Andrea Quijada Coedited by Virginia Eubanks and Andrea Quijada

Across the United States and around the world, new digital tools increasingly mediate access to basic human needs such as housing, food, physical safety, medical care, financial capital, employment, and family integrity. The rapid global spread of the digital welfare state has been under way for at least fifty years, and yet, it is only now being recognized for what it is: a human rights crisis. Under conditions of austerity, ethnic and religious nationalism, and white supremacy, these tools allow states to hide political choices behind a smokescreen of “neutral,” “objective,” and rule-bound decision-making. Living in the Digital Welfare state will find the human stories behind the algorithms.