Rebekah Simcha Otto

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT REBEKAH SIMCHA OTTO

I’m a scholar, writer, and creative invested in the intersections of intimate violence, identity, and place. My work unsettles dominant socio-geographic narratives that inform where Black bodies do and do not belong. In this work I center the lived experiences of Black and Indigenous women, with a particular focus on Black life in Alaska.Rooted in Black and Indigenous feminist epistemologies, my research emerges from a deep commitment to community and the broader activist intention of eradicating gender-based violence. Ultimately, my research is oriented around rendering the disproportionate harm experienced by Alaskan women legible in both national and academic discourse.With an MA in Critical Ethnic Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, I engage archival research, oral history, creative writing, and community-based methods to trace presence, memory, and resistance. I bring the vibrance of my community to this work, centering survivorhood and healing rather than over-simplified narratives of violence. Grounded in a feminist praxis of care, my scholarship reflects how Black and Indigenous women unsettle and transform spaces marked by settler colonialism and intimate violence—and honors the life-giving ways they conceptualize healing and sustain themselves through their everyday embodied practices.In my writing, teaching, and research, I’m committed to work that challenges erasure and creates space for embodied knowledge, cultural memory, and more expansive ways of being.