Ralycia AndrewsPh.D. Student (2025 Cohort)

Ralycia Andrews is a Garifuna (Afro-Indigenous) Caribbean woman whose work flows at the confluence of memory, resistance, and cultural reclamation. Born of volcanic soil and ancestral songs in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, her journey as a cultural worker, researcher, and performer is rooted in a fierce devotion to diasporic memory and the sacred work of telling stories otherwise forgotten.

Ralycia earned her BA in Caribbean Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados and she has deepened her praxis as a dramaturge, digital archivist, and community educator. Her engagements span continents—from curating exhibitions in Barbados, to preserving Indigenous histories as lead researcher of The Portrait Project, to advancing Black feminist research in the Young Scholars Program at the  African American Policy Forum, and performing in several theatre productions. Through her involvement with the Ubuntu Dialogues Project, a collaboration between Michigan State University and Stellenbosch University South Africa and as a Delegate of the UN Ubuntu Leaders Academy, she has fostered global conversations rooted in compassion, critical consciousness, and cultural continuity.

At Emory, Ralycia’s doctoral research in African American Studies will explore embodied archives, sacred arts, and ancestral technologies in Afro-Indigenous communities of the Caribbean and African diaspora. Her work examines the sacred dimensions of foodways in Afro-retentive spiritual practices, asking how the mundane becomes divine, how ancestral kitchens become spaces of resistance, memory, and ritual and how we digest divinity.

With a foundation in decolonial methodology and a spirit grounded in Sankofa and Ubuntu, her research honors the body as archive and performance as ceremonial offering. Her ethos is simple yet profound: to make the invisible visible, to speak in tongues of freedom, and to breathe life into silences left by empire.