Caribbean Women Healers

The Caribbean Women Healers Project: Decolonizing Knowledge Within Afro-Indigenous Traditions, is a collaborative research project built and led by Professor Alai Reyes-Santos and Professor Ana-Maurine Lara as a result of our journeys within Caribbean communities throughout the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Pacific Northwest region. In 2016, after four years of meeting and spending time with Caribbean women that keep their Afro-Indigenous, Indigenous and Afro-descendant healing traditions alive, we were inspired to conceptualize a project that validates their knowledge in a world where Eurocentric notions of health and medicine vilify and dismiss them. As we pursued the project, the women we interviewed and document here have shared a collective investment in sharing their knowledge across generations at a time when migration disrupts the ways in which their communities have passed down knowledge.

To learn more about the research methodology visit the Caribbean Women Healers project website.

There were a number of professionals who helped to make this digital humanities project a reality. Please visit our project team website to learn more about the people who supported building the website, processing digital files, creating transcriptions, converting digital images and digital audio, and consulting on various technical parts of the project.

Wordpress is one of the world's most popular website content management systems. For this project, https://blogs.uoregon.edu was used to host the Caribbean Women Healers website.

Divi is a Wordpress theme used to design the layout and functionality of the Caribbean Women Healers website. 

Panopto is the University of Oregon's streaming media platform. It was used to host healer interviews and publicly share oral traditions that are embedded on the Wordpress website.

StoryMapJS was used to create a geospatial story about the project's research methodology. It brings map readers through an interactive narrative cartography tour highlighting country the researchers visited and what they learned.