Public Scholarship

Through community collaborations, I interweave academic and grassroots work to create impactful social change.

I believe in challenging power hierarchies that value academic experts above community knowledge keepers, and consciously working to equitably meld academic research and community interests. I am interested in the role of art, emotion, and individual life histories in the creation of knowledge and understanding about the world.

The Healing Garden

Founder, Director

The Healing Garden at Hilltop is a space dedicated to slowing down, reconnecting with the land, and reconnecting with self. We work together with the garden to unlearn practices of white supremacy (urgency, perfectionism, homogeneity, hierarchical decision making, defensiveness) and create space for multiple ways of knowing, relating to land, and relating to one another.

Restorative Foodways Project

Principal Investigator

Through the Restorative Foodways Project, we gather together to share food and stories, and teach through embodied relationships to land. Through this project, we promote and support dialogues that go beyond the binary of minority/majority, to explore the pluralism that emerges when we face our complex histories head on.

PAGE

Board Member & PAGE Co-Director (2018-2021)

PAGE (Publicly Active Graduate Education) is Imagining America’s (IA) network for publicly engaged graduate students in humanities, arts, and design. PAGE enhances the praxis and pedagogy of public scholarship.

Sazón Nashville

Founder & Director (2017-2020)

Sazón Nashville empowers local Middle School students to explore the experiences, memories, traditions, and identities that make them unique as a Nashville Latinx community.

The Healing Garden

Curriculum - The Soil

Using the metaphor of soil health as the foundation to a healthy garden environment, students learn about the biology of healthy soil, global Indigenous concepts of reciprocity between humans and nature, and consider how their own histories and identities require routine rebalancing for healthy social ecology.

Download the curriculum

Print zines available for a small fee.

PAGE

Publicly Active Graduate Education

The Comfort Rebellion Cookbook

This cookbook was dreamt up from within the isolation, low self esteem, and overwork that is Grad School – though it is intended for anyone who needs some encouraging words and recipes for comfort. A living document, I hope to watch this cookbook grow with new contributions as readers take a step back and allow themselves space for reflection, knowing that it is ok to slow down. There is a community out here that believes and supports intentional work – work based in the belief that caring for your own healing and needs will unleash the very best parts of you to share with the world. Tag us in your comfort journey at #thecomfortrebellion . You can download a free copy of the cookbook below, or send me a message in the “Contact Me” link for a physical copy.

Donations for printing and mailing costs accepted through Venmo @keitlyn-alcantara

Download the cookbook

In the workshop “El Mundo Zurdo: Food, Belonging, and Community” at Imagining America’s 2019 National Gathering, Albuquerque, participants followed the prompt:

“In what ways do you use food to find moments of peace and resilience? Going out for lunch with friends? Making a cup of hot cocoa? Turning to a family recipe? Think of one recipe that you could share with our community, to inspire a culture of care, coziness and joy.”

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Sazón Nashville

Channel 5 - News This Morning (November 15, 2020)

I started cooking with Latinx middle schoolers three years ago, with a grant from The Curb Center at Vanderbilt and emotional support from then after school program director and magnificent friend Dennise Barrios. In year two, my sporadic cooking visits got a name, and further support from Conexion Americas. Almost exactly a year ago Justin Henderson helped design the logo and website, solidifying what up until then had felt like just a fun thing I did sometimes. Lory Rivera has been pivotal in keeping this work alive this year. This, above all, has been a project that grew because of the community that kept it (and me) afloat. Thank you NewsChannel 5 Nashville and Hanna Mcdonald for the beautiful coverage! Guest chef Lucia Rodenzo rocked it, and the students, as always, were pros.