Serina Payan Hazelwood {Dra/She/Ella}, PhD, MAIS, CSE

My academic journey has been one of resistance, ceremony, and reclamation. I earned my Doctor of Philosophy in Sustainability Education from Prescott College, where my dissertation, Re-Animating Chingonisma: Creating Indigenous Elsewheres Through Liberatory Praxis, reclaims Chingonisma as a living body of knowledge grounded in ceremony, memory, and ancestral resilience. Guided by the cosmology of the Nahui Ollin and the Table of Power, my research calls for spaces of learning and liberation beyond the colonial gaze, what I call The Elsewheres. The Elsewheres are both material and spiritual, places where ancestral knowledge, story, and body converge to create pathways toward liberation. {Request a copy of my Dissertation}

I earned a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies at Prescott College with an emphasis in Liberatory Praxis through Indigenous Knowledges. My capstone, The Table of Power: A Liberatory Praxis Through Indigenous Knowledges, used storywork to name and confront colonial systems through the metaphors of the Ivory Tower and the Table of Power. Through reflexive storytelling and decolonial methods, I explored how assimilation, hierarchy, and extraction function as mechanisms of epistemic violence within academia, and how Indigenous Knowledges can instead generate relational, circular, and liberatory practices of education.{Read Capstone Here}

My Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies at Prescott College centered on Religion, Gender and Sexuality, and Social Justice. My research examined yoga as a colonized and commodified practice that reflects the broader systems of white supremacy, capitalism, and ableism embedded within the wellness industry. Through my senior project, Liberation in Yoga: A 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training Program with a Social Justice Framework, I unsettled myself from the colonial framework of the lifestyle of yoga and examined how liberation could emerge through embodied accountability and truth-telling. This process transformed my understanding of yoga from a practice of performance to a praxis of remembrance, relationship, and responsibility. {read research}; {watch capstone video}. 

My Associate of Arts in Religious Studies and Communication from Glendale Community College marked the true beginning of my academic journey. After collecting courses for twenty-five years, I finally had the capacity to return to school in 2017 as a non-traditional student. With my daughter grown, I had time to learn for myself. I faced the obstacles of starting over, often as the oldest person in the room, relearning subjects like math and navigating spaces not always built for returning students. Yet, in that process, I found extraordinary professors who valued my voice and encouraged me to bring my life experience into the classroom to share with a new generation of learners.

My favorite courses were my honors seminars Women in Religion and Sexuality and Religion with Dr. Julie Waskow, where I began connecting my past experiences as a former Catholic and Seventh-Day Adventist with my growing scholarship as a holistic sexuality educator. Having been introduced to decolonial theory through my certification in sexuality education, I used my time at Glendale Community College to intersect lived experience, decolonial thought, and traditional academia. Every class became an interdisciplinary exploration of culture, power, and embodiment, presenting on Two-Spirit Identity in public speaking and Labiaplasty and the Colonial Gaze in intercultural communication. Community college gave me not only an education but the courage to begin again with intention, integrity, and purpose.