Lorraine Torres Colón

Lorraine Torres Colón is a postdoctoral scholar with the Latino Social Science Pipeline Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Torres Colon is a decolonial feminist sociologist whose work lies at the intersections of coloniality, health, gender, and violence. Methodologically, she bridges community-engaged quantitative methods with Afro-Latinx and Indigenous-Latinx knowledge traditions to model contemporary disparities in mental health, labor-market access, and exposure to violence among racialized communities within former metropoles and the non-sovereign territories they administer. In her free time she enjoys reading science fiction with her partner and furbabies Leia y Asha.

This project focuses on data sovereignty and the structural challenges researchers face when engaging with colonial logics embedded in data collection, ownership, localization, and accessibility in Puerto Rico. The work will broadly involve collecting thematic interviews with social science researchers with the goal of unmasking the ways in which colonial logics prevent systematic research, distort analyses and findings, and obscure the ways that colonial regimes govern, in part through the production of ignorance. The project is derived in part from five years of my doctoral research and the challenges I faced accessing and verifying administrative and survey data within Puerto Rico’s judicial system and mental health and anti-addiction services administration.