Shakti Castro

Shakti Castro is a Phd Candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University. She holds a B.A. from Hunter College and an M.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a member of the National Council on Public History where she serves on the Inclusion Committee, and the Urban History Association where she is a board member. Shakti has been awarded fellowships from the Smithsonian’s Latino Museum Studies program and the Lehman Center for American History at Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in the NACLA Report on the Americas and Public History News. My dissertation, “Agenda of Survival: Puerto Ricans, Public Health, and the Politics of Harm Reduction, 1965 – 2000” examines the Puerto Rican history of needle exchange programs and AIDS activism in New York City and the archipelago. Through archival, ethnographic, and material culture-based research I explore how medical and legal policy, United States empire, and labor and health-based migration shaped the political subjectivity of Puerto Ricans. I argue that Puerto Ricans with substance use issues and those living with HIV/AIDS engaged harm reduction and anticolonial activism, simultaneously, to assert both their bodily autonomy and political sovereignty.