Campus Directory

Pronouns she/her/hers

Division Social Sciences Division

Department/College/Unit Anthropology Department

Title UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow

Affiliation Staff

Staff Type Postdoctoral Scholar

Areas of Expertise Ethnography
Feminist Studies
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Indigenous Peoples
Latino/a Studies
Globalization

Web Site

Primary Office Location Social Sciences 1
312

Mail Stop Social Sciences 1 Faculty Services

Biography, Education and Training

Dr. Morales is an Indigiqueer (Zapotec) feminist scholar, educator, Native ethnographer, and community organizer. She earned her doctoral degree from the Department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She employs contemporary Black, Indigenous, and Chicanx/Latinx feminist theories of gender and sexuality, belonging, and settler colonialism to examine new generations of Indigenous women and Indigiqueer youth’s deployment of different practices of Indigenous governance to build diasporic Indigenous communities in California’s Central Coast and Central Valley. The American Association of University Women, UC-Hispanic Serving Institute Pre-Professoriate Fellowship, and multiple internal research fellowships and grants from UC Santa Barbara have supported her research.

Before completing her doctoral degree, she earned a Master’s in Public Affairs with a minor in Latinx Studies at Cornell University. Her research focused on the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance (NDWA), exploring how race and gender become necessary for understanding workers’ struggles within the immigration, labor, and civil rights movements. Then was a lecturer at the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity at Ithaca College. As a first-generation Zapotec queer scholar and a proud non-traditional student, her anticolonial pedagogies are collaborative and transform spaces of learning within and outside higher education.

She is a member of the Oaxaqueñx Youth Encuentro group and a co-founder of the Collective of Pueblos Originarios in Diaspora, a student campus organization at UC Santa Barbara that aims to heighten the visibility of diasporic Indigenous (Mixtec, Zapotec, and Maya) students on campus. Overall, her goal is to pursue various forms of scholarly activism that are rooted in the struggle and commitment to intergenerational healing from historical trauma and envisioning Indigenous futures.

Selected Presentations

 “Remembering Relationality: Embodying Empowered Indigenous Scholarship” panel, American Studies Association, Baltimore, Maryland, November 14-18, 2024

“Love and Healing: Embracing Multiple Methodologies” panel, National Women’s Studies Association, Baltimore, Maryland, October 29, 2023

 “Care Across Generations: Resistance, Value, and Transformation” roundtable, National Women’s Studies Association, Minneapolis, Minnesota, November 12, 2022

 “Indigenous Online Feminist Pedagogies,” Center for Innovative Teaching, Research and Learning, Engaging Teaching Virtual Symposium, University of California, Santa Barbara, October 20, 2021

 “Decolonizing the Classroom: Ethics, Compassion, and Responsibility,” Center for Innovative Teaching, Research and Learning, Engaging Teaching Virtual Symposium, University of California, Santa Barbara, October 28, 2020

Selected Publications

Peer Review Articles

Morales, Nancy and Daina Sanchez,2024. How do We Build Collaborative Learning Environments and Practices as Diasporic Indigenous Researchers? in Communities of Practice and Ethnographic Fieldwork: Creating Supportive Research Expereinces. Edited by Lee Cabatigan, Deyanira Nevarez Martinez, and Susan Bibler Coutin. New York, NY: Routledge Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003402701-15

Goffe, Tao Leigh, Shannon Gleeson, Atif Khan, Austin Kocher, Christin Washington Judith Salcido, Rewa Phansalkar, Ryan Persadie, Anisa Jackson, Elspeth Iralu, Erica Violet Lee, Hashem Abushama, Nisrin Elamin, Randa Tawil, Citlali Sosa-Riddell, Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera, Kelsey Moore, Lydia Macklin Camel, Mónica Ramírez Bernal, Nancy Morales, Amanda Pinheiro, Ana Ozaki, André Nascimento, Christopher Roberts, Essah Díaz, Reighan Gillam, Juhwan Seo, Priyanka Sen, Andrea Chung, Melanie Puka, Tauren Nelson, and Heidi Amin-Hong. "The World We Became: Map Quest 2350, A Speculative Atlas Beyond Climate Crisis", Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 7, 1-2 (2022): 5-49. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/23523085-07010002

Other Commentary and Public Scholarship

Interview with Asumi Shuda, UC Santa Barbara’s Daily Nexus, “Student Organizers  Demonstrate Die-in in Honor of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit People Awareness Day,” May 2022.

Interview with Debbie Nathan, NPR’s Latino USA, “Challenging the Checkpoints,” October 2014.

 Morales, N., “Óyeme Voz: Latin@ and Immigration Communities Resound Citizenship and Belonging.” Sounding Out: The Sound Studies Blog, January 2014.