2025-26 Açıksöz & RVRPP
About
Self-Portraits of Disability After Violence in Los Angeles
Looking at Los Angeles through a disability justice lens requires confronting how disability is produced through the intertwined forces of systemic racism, mass incarceration, punitive drug and immigration regimes, the deepening housing crisis, and the ongoing withdrawal of public welfare. Violence prevention programs such as Rancho’s Violence Recovery and Prevention Program (RVRPP) play a crucial role in advancing disability justice within this landscape.
Many of the participants who enter Rancho’s RVRPP after sustaining life-altering gunshot wounds come from working-class Black and Latinx communities disproportionately exposed to interpersonal and police violence, racial segregation, and chronic public disinvestment. Their encounters with public institutions are often shaped by racialized and carceral forms of care and punishment that profoundly influence their recovery and future life trajectories. In this context, violence prevention work is not simply about interrupting discrete incidents of harm, but about addressing the structural and relational conditions that generate cycles of personal, interpersonal, and community violence through long-term accompaniment, peer mentorship, and institutional support for survivors—people otherwise left to navigate recovery, reintegration, and bureaucratic systems largely on their own.
Partnership Focus
A photo-ethnographic method that centers survivors’ perspectives, embodied knowledge, and creative practices is uniquely suited to this collaborative endeavor. Black and Latinx survivors of violence are routinely represented by others through sensational media coverage, policing, and surveillance and made hypervisible within racialized visual regimes. This project reclaims the camera as a tool of self-representation by enabling participants to turn the lens toward their own bodies, neighborhoods, everyday practices, and forms of healing. In doing so, the collaboration aims to create an accessible and non-objectifying visual storytelling archive that approaches violently acquired disability beyond the narrow scripts of victimhood and criminality.
