Profile

Dr. Alaí Reyes-Santos is an independent scholar and consultant. She teaches as a Professor of Practice at U of Oregon's School of Law and is the Associate Director of the Mellon-funded PNWJust Futures Institute for Climate and Racial Justice (jfi.uoregon.edu). She formerly taught as an Associate Professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at UO. 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, and social and environmental organizations. ACC's team offers an approach to social and environmental justice, and conflict resolution, grounded in ancestral healing practices that serve the individual and the collective. Dr. Reyes-Santos currently serves in Oregon's Racial Justice Council's Environmental Equity Committee; and as the co-director of Bohio Cibanani, 501c3.

 

Dr. Reyes-Santos is the author of Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles (Rutgers 2015), Sanadores (Buho 2021), and articles, essays, and op-eds in published in a variety of venues. The digital humanities project Caribbean Women Healers: Decolonizing Knowledge Within AfroIndigenous Traditions (2020) showcases interviews with healers, ethnobotanical resources, and curriculum and bibliographical resources (healers.uoregon.edu). It is being re-conceptualized to include Indigenous and Black healers and traditional ecological knowledge keepers in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Her current manuscripts-in-progress propose a Black Diasporic approach to betrayals among kin emerging from racial, gender and environmental violence. These projects have been supported by grants and fellowships from Mellon Foundation, Meyer Memorial Trust, the Future of Minority Studies, The Dominican Research Institute, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, the Center for the Study of Women in Society, Oregon Humanities Center, the Digital Scholarship Center, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

 

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.

 

As a founding member of the Oregon Water Futures Collaborative, she continues to contribute to the articulation of a water justice agenda in the state and nationwide. After supporting a 330million dollars water package in 2022, OWF moved to its second outreach phase in 2022 as a collaboration between Willamette Partnership, Coalition of Communities of Color, Verde, Oregon Environmental Council, Oregon Voice, and UO’s Environmental and NaturalResources Law Center.