The Human Rights Center is pleaded to work with extraordinary professionals from fields of human rights practice: researchers, advocates, technologists, journalists, and lawyers. These visiting professionsals support our students, staff, and faculty for a one-year period.
Annita Lucchesi is Executive Director of Sovereign Bodies Institute, a research institute dedicated to community-engaged research on gender and sexual violence against Indigenous people. Sovereign Bodies Institute (SBI) builds on Indigenous traditions of data gathering and knowledge transfer to create, disseminate, and put into action research on gender and sexual violence against Indigenous people. For more information on SBI, please visit their website, at sovereign-bodies.org.
Annita is also a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, in the School of Geography & Development and in the Gender & Women's Studies department. She earned her BA in Geography, with a minor in Global Poverty & Practice, from the University of California, Berkeley in 2012, and graduated with highest honors. She graduated Washington State University with her MA in American Studies in 2016. Her research interests include indigenous and critical cartography, indigenous feminisms, postcolonial geographies, and indigenous research methodologies. Her dissertation work examines the intersections of Indigenous data sovereignty, violence against Indigenous women and girls, and cartography, by studying how data on colonial sexual violence and mapping technologies are utilized in tandem to subjugate Indigenous women and girls and occupy Indigenous homelands.
Annita is a Cheyenne descendant, and her ancestors traditionally made their home in northeastern Colorado and southern Wyoming. Her Indian name is Hetoevėhotohke'e, which translates to Evening Star Woman.
Thank you to the Full Circle Fund at the Tamalpais Trust for giving the Human Rights Center the opportunity to work with Annita Lucchesi as a Visiting Professional in 2020.