Holy Water: a ceremonial sojourn

Dr. Skyller Walkes is a graduate of the Adult, Professional, and Community Education doctoral program at Texas State University, and her scholarship focuses on Critical Race Theory, Afro-Latinx identity, art activism, race, and intersectionality. Dr. Walkes also holds three bachelor’s degrees in the areas of Communications, English, and Mass Media Journalism from Rutgers University and a master’s degree in Early Childhood Education and Administration from Kean University. She also holds a Master’s in Science in Juvenile Justice from Prairie View A&M University.

In her immediate past role as the inaugural Assistant Dean of Diversity & Inclusion and Assistant Professor of Instruction in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Walkes served as chief College of Pharmacy spokesperson for diversity equity, accessibility, and inclusion. This encompasses areas of recruitment, selection, appointment, and retention of diverse students, faculty and staff, while promoting a culturally responsive approach to pedagogical and andragogical development in the Healthcare Sciences and equitable community outcomes. Dr. Walkes’ work encompasses several international projects for schools, regional libraries, and diversity community education for numerous entities, including the United States Embassy in Madrid, Spain, Diversity Abroad, and the Southwest Region of the Anti-Defamation League. Dr. Walkes has successfully developed and implemented restorative justice and positive identity development curricula for community centers and institutions.

As for her co-curricular involvement, she currently serves as President and Director of Educational Programming at the Calaboose African American History Museum, Chief of Staff and Operations for nonprofit Where We Thrive, Inc., both for which she is also their chief grant writer with an exceptionally high success rate.

Her professional associations include but are not limited to: President of the Texas Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, Educational Consultant for CARE- College Athletes for Respect and Equality, and Advisory Board for the Black Doctoral Network.

Dr. Walkes’ redoubtable work surrounding social justice in schools, universities, and neighboring communities is demonstrated in her steadfast civic engagement to advance access to equitable resources within communities. This can additionally be seen in her work spearheading roughly 50 COVID-19 testing and vaccination clinics with community partners in under-supported and under-resourced communities since December 2020.

Jennifer Ligaya is an AfroPinay sound, movement, and performance practitioner, and healer born and raised in Chicago with an interdisciplinary background in visual art, vocal performance, dance, and theater. Mother to a Scorpio son and full-time PhD student of Performance Studies at Northwestern University, her original work includes solo and collaborative performance compositions and sound installations. A sponsored artist, grant recipient, and commissioned multimedia artist, her compositions amplify critical conversations around identity, liberatory practices, ancestral indigenous knowledge systems, and moments of communal healing, through the weaving of traditional and contemporary sound, performance, and personal ancestral folk arts practices. The newest core member of Honey Pot Performance in Chicago and executive director of SaltWaterRoad Artist Residency in Montgomery, Alabama, her current creative practice explores Afro-Diasporic feminist subjectivities and speculative arts, indigenous healing and survival practices, and the genealogies of justice through community engaged, ethnographic, and practice based research.

Yudith Nieto is a queer Mexican-American organizer, language justice worker, and interdisciplinary artist originally based in Houston, Texas. She has put her efforts into advocating for Environmental justice in fenceline communities since 2012. She’s worked with frontline communities across the country and the Gulf South to create, develop and amplify community-led media around just transition stories, including artbuilds in solidarity with intersectional movements for a decolonized multilingual approach to weave networks of solidarity and mutual aid to respond to the ever frequent natural disasters due to climate change. Yudith is also a confounding member of Another Gulf is Possible, a collaborative built upon decades of organizing resulting in a strong and rooted ecosystem of relationships between individuals tied to a multitude of organizations, networks, communities, and alliances from the US Gulf South to the Global South.

Nayyir Akilah Ransome is a writer, dreamer, doer, organizer, and creator whose work centers themes of family, connection, community, and healing. Their work is deeply informed by our relationships to resources, legacy, and place, and how they inform our visions for the future. Spending their formative years on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, PA, and their adolescence and adulthood along the southern Mississippi River in Baton Rouge, LA, their relationship to water, movement, and memory frequently appears in their work. At present, they are serving as Port Community Liaison for the Southern Louisiana at Ocean Conservancy where they focus on the intersection of arts and culture as a tool for advocacy, empowerment, and mobilization in near-port communities. Looking at the impact that port operations have on near-port communities, Nayyir is working with an array of stakeholders to ensure a just and equitable transition cleaner port.