Omi S 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.
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.