OMI SALAS-SANTACRUZ

Dr. Omi Salas-SantaCruz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education, Culture & Society at the University of Utah. Their scholarship develops conceptual and qualitative approaches for examining how educational institutions produce categories of personhood, knowledge, and legitimacy through policy, discourse, and administrative practice. Drawing on decolonial theory, borderlands thought, critical race inquiry, and trans and queer studies, they investigate how institutional common sense is constructed, maintained, and contested through the everyday work of evaluation, compliance, care, and governance.

Dr. Salas-SantaCruz is recognized for advancing scholarship in decolonial trans feminism, jotería studies, and trans* of color critique in education. Their work has introduced concepts including the Colonial Gender Continuum, colonial dysphoria, and jotería literacies, offering theoretical frameworks for understanding how colonial epistemologies shape educational institutions, learning, and the production of knowledge. 

A growing strand of Dr. Salas-SantaCruz’s scholarship examines Title IX and the institutional governance of sex-based discrimination, with particular attention to how gender and sexuality are interpreted, regulated, and made legible through institutional policies, reporting systems, investigations, and administrative decision-making. This work brings feminist jurisprudence, queer and trans studies, and critical institutional analysis into conversation to examine how institutions determine what counts as discrimination, harassment, notice, harm, and remedy.

They direct the JOTA Lab (Justice-Oriented Teaching and Theories in the Academy), a collaborative space for scholarship, mentorship, and collective inquiry grounded in intergenerational care, collective study, intellectual generosity, and justice-oriented knowledge production. Dr. Salas-SantaCruz also serves in national leadership roles, including Co-Chair of the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS) and Chair of the Executive SIG Committee of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).