ABOUT PROFESSOR AMARILYS ESTRELLA
Amarilys Estrella is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Affiliate of the Center for African and African American Studies and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Rice University. Her research and teaching interests broadly focus on the intersections of race and gender within Afro-diasporic transnational movements, Afro-Latinx feminisms, as well as statelessness, human rights and anti-racist activism. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic research in the Dominican Republic and New York City, Estrella explores grassroots social activism in response to the deaths of Black individuals who form part of a global movement against statelessness. She analyzes the role of reandando, returning during the process of death, as an indication of the spaces of liminality in which Black Dominicans of Haitian descent exist as ghosts, zombies, or muertos civiles, to interpret the movement’s organizing in response to death by racism.
