Division for Change and Empowerment (Di.C.E)

Dr. Assata Zerai is the vice president and professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico. At the helm of the Division for Change and Empowerment, Zerai’s strong record of leading, resourcing, and documenting the impact of efforts to promote institutional climate and inclusive excellence have expanded UNM’s programming and strategies to enhance students’ experiences and academic achievement, and extraordinary productivity of faculty and staff.

Zerai is a founding member of the Feminist Decoloniality as Care (FEMDAC) mentoring network with colleagues at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, University of Illinois, Stellenbosch University, and Durban University of Technology (supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, 2019-25). With FEMDAC colleagues, Zerai guest edited an issue of Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, “Feminist Decoloniality as Care in Higher Education”. And they are publishing the forthcoming edited volume, The Palgrave Handbook of Feminist Decolonial Methods and Care in Higher Education. Zerai’s research deploys decolonial feminist research methodologies to analyze inclusion in complex organizations, access to information and communications technologies, novel contributions of Black women’s scholarship globally, and structural impediments to maternal and child health. She has published six books and numerous articles in academic presses spanning these topics. Her latest is, Black Feminist Interventions to Decolonize the Westernized University (2025). With colleagues at UNM, she and co-editors published a special issue of Social Sciences (MDPI), “Restorative Justice Practices Within Higher Education and the Arts: Addressing Complex Legacies of Harm” (2026) and they have recently proposed the book, Making Servingness a Reality: Confronting Past Harms and Dreaming New Futures. Zerai is Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where she served from 2002-2019 and was Visiting Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, 2020-2026.