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A St. Olaf College-based Caribbean humanities initiative is gaining new momentum after being the only undergraduate institution to present at a Yale University–organized major global digital Caribbean studies gathering in Boston.

Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Patricia Boldt Distinguished Teaching Professor of the Humanities Kristina Medina-Vilariño and research investigator Ahmed Sajidan (Saji) Jarjis Rafsan ‘27 represented the Caribbean Studies Lab (an initiative hosted by the Caribbean Studies Network) at the Caribbean Digital XII conference, organized by Yale University. The conference brought together scholars, artists, and digital humanities practitioners whose work engages the Caribbean through oral archives, storytelling, migration mapping, and community-based research. 

For Medina-Vilariño and Rafsan, the conference was a chance to introduce a St. Olaf-rooted project to a broader network of collaborators, and to show how undergraduate-centered work can contribute to a growing field. 

“We were a bit nervous at first, looking at the lineup of other presenters from institutions like Yale and Stanford, but the organizers made us feel really welcome, and as we got to experience the range of scholarship on show at this conference, we came to understand that we represent a niche perspective and approach to our study,” Rafsan says. “It really showed us the potential and capacity to go beyond and create a model of how undergraduate groups, which may have fewer funding resources compared to big graduate or research schools, can actually move understanding forward and create something replicable for academia.”

Founded in 2013, the Caribbean Studies Network began as a Facebook group created by Medina-Vilariño to connect people working in and around Caribbean studies. Since then, it has expanded into a wider digital platform that brings individuals together to explore a myriad of topics connected to the Caribbean and its diasporas. The newly-minted lab’s website describes the project as an effort to “decolonize and democratize the study of the Caribbean” by centering communal knowledge and collaborative research.  

Medina-Vilariño says the idea grew out of a gap she repeatedly saw between academic scholarship and the knowledge already being produced within Caribbean communities.

“I’ve always seen that you have academics and you have community leaders that are working on different, yet connected, things,” she says. “Unless you’re traveling to or spending a significant amount at these sites and you’re very well aware about everything that’s happening there in regards to whatever movement you care about, you don’t know what’s happening on the ground. And vice-versa, there may be a lot of academic material being produced that these communities don’t have access to. There is knowledge happening in these communities, and content happening in academia, and my idea was to create a bridge between those two groups.”

That bridge remains central to the project’s mission. Rather than treating Caribbean communities as subjects to be studied, Medina-Vilariňo says the lab aims to amplify the work already being done on the ground–whether through oral histories, visual storytelling, grassroots activism, or local archives. 

The next phase of that work is taking shape. If the Caribbean Studies Network created the platform to elevate cross-discipline connection, the Caribbean Studies Lab is intended to assist participants generate the projects, partnerships, and infrastructure that will keep expanding it. 

For Medina-Vilariño, that evolution was shaped in part by St. Olaf itself. She says that although Northfield is geographically far from the Caribbean, the college’s undergraduate environment became an unexpected strength. Students with interests in theory, languages, digital humanities, and community-engaged work have helped build projects that make Caribbean stories more visible and accessible. 

“We have a lot of really good undergrad students, many of them from Latin American backgrounds, who come with skillsets in a variety of areas,” Medina-Vilariño says. “I work with those students to create an informal training program so that they learn how to produce history, political, cultural, or identity projects that are rooted in the two sources of information we draw from — the academic and the lived experience.” 

Rafsan, who has worked closely with Medina-Vilariño for nearly a year, has helped push the initiative into a new stage of growth. While other students have often contributed to individual projects, Medina-Vilariño says Rafsan’s role has been broader: helping shape the project’s overall narrative, identify new partners, pursue networking opportunities, and ideate what comes next. 

“I basically told him, ‘This is your baby. This is where I want this to go — how are you going to get it there?’” she says. “I mean, you want to talk about academic civic engagement — that is what he is doing here, all the time.” 

That collaborative approach has made this mentorship different from a more traditional faculty-student research relationship, Medina-Vilariño says. Rather than simply executing an assigned project, Rafsan has helped steer the direction of the work itself. 

“He is very good at connecting; he was actually the one who found this conference,” she explains. “While he hasn’t been working on one specific project, he has been working on the entire narrative, how to grow our audience, find collaborators who reflect the work we have done so far, and then determine where we should take this next.”  

Rafsan says the conference brought together a wide range of scholars and practitioners — from those working in traditional academic research to others focused on oral archives, digital storytelling, and community-based projects. 

“Caribbean studies can at times feel like a small field, but scholars and activists are often working in very niche subjects, and so are unaware of developments within the broader context,” he says. “This conference had a way of connecting all of these disparate initiatives, and for us it quickly became about expanding our ecosystem and sharing how our platform elevates digital humanities, both from Oles and from sources off the Hill. We hope that our presentation about the Caribbean Studies Lab will encourage other institutions to partner with us.”

That momentum is already shaping the lab’s next phase. Rafsan has taken a leading role in expanding its intellectual and institutional scope, including the development of a podcast platform that convenes scholars, artists, and practitioners working across Caribbean migration, identity, and the digital humanities. Conceived as both an archival and dialogic space, the initiative situates interdisciplinary exchange within a broader ecosystem of publicly accessible scholarship. In addition, Rafsan is leading the design of standardized, modular curricula in Caribbean studies and digital humanities at a level comparable to program-building efforts within major research institutions. These frameworks function not simply as teaching materials, but as adaptable academic infrastructures for implementation across under-resourced universities and community institutions throughout the Caribbean and its diasporas, integrating community-centered research, multilingual scholarship, and digital methodologies into a model of locally grounded yet globally legible knowledge production.

This work aligns with the lab’s goal to create space for projects that do not always fit within traditional academic structures. 

“A lot of the work we engage with is community-based, and it doesn’t necessarily have a clear connection to established academia,” Rafsan explains. “We want people to understand that this work is of equal value, and the former should be elevated to the same level as content produced by the latter, as both are essential to gaining a broad understanding of the communities we are engaged with. We want to be a platform where diverse voices and forms of knowledge can come in and experience agency and representation.”

On campus, the initiative has also received special recognition. In 2025 Medina-Vilariño and the Caribbean Studies Lab received the North Central Council of Latin Americanists (NCCLA) Award of Merit at their annual conference at St. Olaf. 

Looking ahead, both Medina-Vilariño and Rafsan said their goals for the future of the Caribbean Studies Lab include expanding collaborations, recruiting more students, developing new projects, and building a more sustainable long-term structure for the work. 

In parallel, Medina-Vilariño and Rafsan are currently developing a series of manuscripts for submission to leading peer-reviewed journals in digital humanities and Caribbean studies. Their work engages questions of identity formation, transnational migration, diasporic memory, digital archiving, epistemic justice, and the ethics of AI-mediated knowledge production.

For Medina-Vilariño, the point is not to claim ownership over a growing field, but to contribute to it responsibly. 

“We want to shift the way we think about approaching an area or different cultures for study,” she says. “Academia is not the only way to access this work — we want to amplify and center community knowledge and community experiences and civic engagement.”

What began as a digital network has evolved into a research infrastructure, one that is increasingly legible not only within liberal arts contexts, but across the broader landscape of global humanities scholarship.