Alaí Reyes-Santos
Professor of Practice
Biography
Dr. Alaí Reyes-Santos is a scholar and consultant. Recent awards include: 2020 Woman of Recognition (NAACP Eugene-Springfield); 2021 Mellon Foundation Just Futures Grant; 2022 Racial Equity and Sustainability Collaborations Award (Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education); 2022 Honorable Mention, Best Public Projects (Latin American Studies Association Digital Scholarship Section); 2022 Excellence in Teaching Sustainability (U of Oregon); 2022 Dominican Studies Institute Fellow.
At University of Oregon, she has three roles: Professor of Practice at U of Oregon's School of Law; Director of the Mellon Foundation-funded (4.5 million) PNW Just Futures Institute for Climate and Racial Justice; and Director of the Water Equity Fund (1.5 million) at JFI/Climate Solutions Center. An award-winning teacher, her Ted-talk “Building Intercultural Communities” is used in higher ed and popular education to initiate guidelines for dialogue across difference.
She is also the founder of ACC, a BIPOC-led consulting firm that facilitates organizational transformations and community engagement in the non-profit sector, government, higher ed, arts and cultural initiatives, emergency preparedness and response, and social and environmental justice organizations. ACC is currently a named partner in the Environmental Justice Technical Assistance Center funded by the Environmental Protection Agency to serve Region 10.
Dr. Reyes-Santos currently serves in Oregon's Racial Justice Council's Environmental Equity Committee providing recommendations to the Office of the Governor.
The community-action research project she co-founded and co-led for four years as a member of Oregon Water Futures Collaborative contributes to the articulation of a water justice agenda in the state and nationwide. After supporting a 530 million dollars water package, OWF moved to its second outreach phase in 2022 and completed a Water Justice Policy Framework; the framework informed the Drought Package passed by the Oregon Legislature in 2023, and a Water Justice Leadership Institute led by Verde. The innovative Water Justice Network emerging from within OWF's advocacy centers people of color, women, and queer leadership in the water sector.
Education
Publications:
“Radical Boricuir Ecologies.” Co-authored. Centro Journal 35.1 (2023): 153-177.
“Afro-Indigenous Women Healers in the Caribbean and its Diasporas: A Decolonial
Digital Humanities Project.” Co-authored. Digital Humanities Quarterly. 16.3 (2022).
Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles. Rutgers University Press, 2015.
"Mangú y Mofongo: Intra-Latinx Subjectivities in Dominican-Puerto Rican Families." Co-author Ana-Maurine Lara. Centro Journal, 2018.
“On Pan-Antillean Politics: Betances and Luperón Speak to the Present.” Callaloo 36.1 (2013): 142–157.
"Afro-descendencia y pan-americanismo en el pensamiento antillanista del siglo diecinueve." Estudios Sociales XLI.154 (May 2013): 29-51.
“Capital neoliberal, raza, migración: relaciones domínico-haitianas y domínico-puertorriqueñas.” Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 24.1 (February 2008): 13-34.
"Notas sobre identidades étnicas y raciales dominicanas." Co-author Ramona Hernandez. Afrodescendendientes en México y Nuestra América. Ed. Jesús María Serna e Israel Ugalde Quintana. Centro de Investigaciones sobre América Latina y el Caribe, UNAM: 2019.
“Anowa and Tituba, Witch or Feminist?: A Comparative Study of Two Postcolonial Characters.” African Diasporas: Ancestors, Migrations and Boundaries. Eds. Robert Cancel and Winifred Woodhull. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2008. African Literature Association Annual Series Vol. 14: 115-123.
Statement
I am a cultural studies scholar devoted to the analysis of stories about kinship, solidarity, and betrayal in the midst of socio-historical violence, with an emphasis on the Black Diaspora and its connections with multiple communities. Since I can remember, I have loved reading and listening to stories. Now I document, trace, and analyze stories in literature, interviews, media, dances, mid-conversation, in a batey, in a marquesina, in a bus, anywhere a good story gets my attention.
Research
I am a professor of African Diaspora Studies who also teaches at the UO Law School Conflict Resolution Program. My book, Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles (Rutgers University Press, 2015), coins the term transcolonial kinship to describe anti-racist, feminist, and queer modes of solidarity across island borders. The manuscripts-in-progress titled Our Kin in Diaspora: Sacred Stories of Motherhood in the Aftermath of Slavery and Oceanic Whispers: Stories of Betrayal and Kinship in the Port Towns of the Black Diaspora are both creative-academic endeavor that intervene in conversations about social violence, solidarity, and community healing through storytelling practices and a theoretical lens derived from Afro-Caribbean sacred ceremonial traditions.
The ongoing research project with Dr. Ana-Maurine Lara, titled Decolonizing Knowledge: AfroIndigenous Caribbean Women Healers, will showcase healers and their ethnobotanical resources through an open-access digital archive sponsored by the UO Digital Humanities Scholarship Center. Digital Humanities have become increasingly relevant to my scholarship. In 2017-2018, I led the digital project The UO Puerto Rico Project: Hurricane Maria and the Aftermath with a student team devoted to collecting stories about Puerto Ricans in the island and Oregon, and develop publicly available educational tools about the natural disaster. These two projects have informed an emerging environmental justice research agenda articulated through a collaboration with student interns and community partners on the storytelling project Oregon Water Futures.
As a public intellectual, I have served as a consultant with the Organization of American States' Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Northwest Youth Corps, School Garden Project, Non-Profit Association of Oregon, Northeast Oregon Economic Development District, and Mobilize Green, among others, on equity, inclusion, and environmental initiatives. I also served on MRG Foundation's Board of Directors and intercultural education initiatives in Centro Bono's migrant justice programs in the Dominican Republic. I am a contributor to HipLatina, a digital publication, and Oregon’s Register Guard. The Ted-talk “Building Intercultural Communities” is widely used in higher ed and community-based educational settings.
A priestess and tradition keeper of regla de ocha and regla conga-Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions-and founder of the ceremonial space Ilé Estrella de los Mares, I draw from my academic and ceremonial training to foster open conversations about social violence, power, and solidarity. The Ilé honors Caribbean Indigenous, Congo, and Yoruba heritages through transnational educational exchanges. An award-winning teacher, I received the 2015 Ersted Distinguished Teaching Award.
Honors and Awards
2023 Selected Planning Committee Member, “Integrating the Human Sciences to Scale Societal Responses to Environmental Change," National
Academies of Sciences
2022 Racial Equity and Sustainability Collaborations Award, Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education
2022 Featured by Color of Water: Top Directory of BIPOC Water Experts
2022 Excellence in Teaching, Sustainability Awards, U of Oregon
2022 Honorable Mention, Best Public Project, Latin American Studies Association/ Archives, Libraries and Digital Scholarship Section
2020 Woman of Recognition, NAACP Eugene-Springfield Chapter, Oregon
2016 Distinguished Woman of Achievement, Black Women of Achievement, U of Oregon
2015 Ersted Distinguished Teaching Award, University of Oregon
2015 Guy Alexandre Paper Prize, Haiti-Dominican Republic Section, Latin American Studies Association Conference
2008 Fall Professor of the Term, Mortar Board Society, University of Oregon
2007 Distinguished Woman of Achievement, Black Women of Achievement, U of Oregon
2007 Outstanding Faculty Award, Office of Multicultural Advising and Support, University of Oregon
2005 Barbara and Paul Saltman Distinguished Teaching Award, UCSD Academic Senate