Eileen Galvez, Ancestral Archiving Methodologies: Central American & Caribbean Knowledge Production from Outside of Disciplinary Borders

Eileen Galvez (she/ella) is the 2024-2025 Education Studies Research Fellow at Yale University and a Ph.D. candidate of Higher Education at Colorado State University. Previously, she served as Director of La Casa Cultural and Assistant Dean of Yale College from 2015-2024. In her scholarship, Eileen examines colonial and imperial practices of the academy through the centering of Central American and Isthmian peoples and their transisthmian hybridity within the higher education ecology. To do so, she theoretically engages with Central American epistemologies, histories, and cultural practices of revolutionary storying in her methodological explorations. Eileen is the daughter and sister of Salvadoran refugees and was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles.

Ancestral Archiving Methodologies: Central American & Caribbean Knowledge Production from Outside of Disciplinary Borders

Designed as a study as a form of epistemological resistance to the academy’s non-belonging of Central American knowledge production, Eileen centered the perspectives and embodied knowledge of Central American faculty in the U.S. academy to examine three forms of (in)visibilities: hypervisibility, invisibility, and visibility. The results of this ethnographic research reveal how the academy systematically invisibilizes Central American knowledge production through a process of disciplinary bordering formed from U.S. racial and ethnic hierarchies, as well as mestizaje racial ideologies originated from Latin America. In this talk, Eileen will discuss how, in being displaced academically, Central American faculty have been developing ancestral archiving methodologies to bring scholarly visibility to Black and Indigenous Central American and Caribbean communities.