Speakers

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo is associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His most recent book is the critically acclaimed Puerto Rico: A National History, and he is also the author of The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico, as well as numerous book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles, and public-facing works. More recently, he collaborated with global superstar Bad Bunny in the historical narratives that accompany DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS’ YouTube visualizers. He is currently finishing a monograph titled A Counter-Republic of Letters: Friendship, Revolution, and Anarchist History-Making and is co-editor, with Dr. Aurora Santiago Ortiz, of the forthcoming Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies. 

 

Aurora Santiago Ortiz is an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies and Chicane/Latine studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on antiracist feminisms, decolonial perspectives, and participatory action research. She has published numerous articles, and her current book manuscript, entitled Circuits of Self-Determination: Mapping Radical Solidarities and Infrastructures of Resistance in Twenty-first Century Puerto Rico, examines anarchist, anti-colonial, feminist, and antiracist grassroots and mutual aid projects that enact a prefigurative politics of decolonization in the present. She is also co-editor, with Dr. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, of of the forthcoming Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies.

 

Scot Nakagawa is a 42-year veteran of social and economic justice advocacy and has served as an organizer, political strategist, and social movement analyst in the struggle against authoritarianism and for equitable and inclusive democracy. He is the cofounder and director of The 22nd Century Initiative, a national strategy and action hub building power at the intersection of opposition to authoritarianism and expanding democratic governance in the U.S. He has worked with organizations such as the Coalition for Human Dignity, the National Anti-Klan Network, the National LGBTQ Task Force, the Highlander Research and Education Center, and numerous political campaigns to limit the power and influence of racist, antisemitic, patriarchal, and religious fundamentalist leaders and groups. Scot is also the co-founder and past senior partner of ChangeLab, an Asian American think/act laboratory addressing issues of social justice and Asian American leadership, work that has been recognized by the Association of Asian American Studies, Community Leader Award. He is a past Open Society Foundations fellow, and senior fellow on nationalism, authoritarianism, and race of Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation. He is a writer whose essays on authoritarianism and resistance can be found in The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook on Substack.