This two-day in-person workshop is a partnership with the Black Feminist Eco Lab at the University of Utah, the Women Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Wake Forest University, and the Black Women and Girls Symposium. The partnership brings together 11 Caribbean feminist scholars conducting research and teaching at U.S academic institutions, providing an opportunity to discuss and document their lived experiences as Caribbean feminist academics in the U.S., exploring how their diasporic positionality shapes their scholarly contributions. At the workshop participants will collaboratively develop and refine abstracts for an edited collection titled Being when the Body is Foreign: Doing Caribbean Feminisms in the U.S., which will contribute to the broader discourse within Caribbean feminist scholarship.
This workshop will be held on April 4 - 5, 2025.
Workshop Information
-
Day 1 (April 4)
- 7:00 – 8:00 am: (Optional) Yoga & breath work with Grace Miller at one of the AirBNBs
- 9:00 – 9:30 am: Travel to the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law (room 2100 & 2110)
- 9:30 – 10:00 am: Breakfast (provided)
- 10:00 – 12:00 noon: Session 1: Introduction & Setting Intentions
- Welcome & Workshop Goals: Overview of the edited collection’s purpose and projected impact (30 minutes)
- Community Agreements and intention setting for the gathering (30 minutes)
- Group Check-In. Each participant:
- Shares their motivations for contributing to the collection and
- Answers the question: “What does Caribbean Feminisms in the Diaspora mean to you?” (30 minutes)
- Activity: Develop collective guiding themes to frame the abstracts. (e.g., representation, intersectionality, anti-colonial perspectives, honesty, unmanageability of our lives). Readings by M Nourbese Philip and M Jacqui Alexander will serve as guides. (30 minutes)
- 12:00 – 1:00 pm: Lunch (provided)
- 1:00 – 3:30 pm Session 2: Peer Review and Feedback (Facilitated by Dr Julia Jordan-Zachery)
- Guided Individual Writing Time: Review and drafting of abstracts (60 minutes)
- Structured Peer Review: Working in groups to review abstract drafts: focusing on clarity, coherence, and alignment with the collection’s guiding themes (45 minutes)
- Feedback Circle: Participants regroup to share key feedback points and discuss common themes. (30 minutes)
- 3:30- 4:00 pm: Day 1 reflections
- 4:15- 4:45 pm: Return to AirBNBs/hotel
- 6:30 – Until: Ah Welcome Lime (Dinner provided)
- A gyaff session where each person shares a memory, proverb, or song lyric connected to their Caribbean identity or heritage.
- A mix of Caribbean music and a nice lime.
Day 2 (April 5)
- Breakfast (on your own)
- 9:00 – 9:20 am: ravel to the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law (Flynn room 6500)
- 9:30 am – 12:00 pm: Session 3: Chapter Abstract Presentations
- Individual Abstract presentation to the entire group for general feedback (10 minutes each)
- 12:00 – 12:30 pm: Session 4: Next Steps
- Session Organizers lead a discussion with contributors to agree on a timeline for submitting full papers, peer review process, and any other support needed.
- 12:30- 1:45 pm: Return to Airbnb/hotel, Lunch on Your own
- 2:00 - 5:30 pm: Outside Activities
-
Managing the Unmanageable, Marlene Nourbese Philip, in Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe (Wellesley, MA: Calaloux, 1990)Remembering This Bridge Called My Back, Remembering Ourselves, Alexander, M. Jacqui, in Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Duke University Press, 2006).
Participants
View Bio
Andrea N. Baldwin
she/her
Andrea N. Baldwin
Andrea N. Baldwin is an associate professor in the divisions of gender and ethnic studies and
the associate dean for research in the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the
University of Utah. Dr. Baldwin who is an attorney-at-law and holds a master’s degree in
international trade policy and a Ph.D. in gender and development studies, is the founder of the
Black Feminist Eco Lab at the University of Utah. She has several publications including her
2021 book monograph A Decolonial Black Feminist Theory of Reading and Shade: Feeling the
University; 2019 and 2023 co-edited books in the Standpoints Black feminisms book series with Virginia Tech Publishing; and a 2023 co-edited volume on global Black feminisms. She is the creator and co-host of Standpoints, a Black feminist podcast produced by Virginia Tech
Publishing, and the co-curator of the Caribbean feminist series for Black Women Radicals. Dr. Baldwin was born and raised on the small Caribbean island state of Barbados and considers
herself an all-around Caribbean woman who loves everything coconut and soca.
View Bio
Pamela Cappas-Toro
she/her
Pamela Cappas-Toro
Pamela Cappas-Toro is the Operations Director of Higher Education in Prison, concurrently serving as a faculty member in the World Languages and Cultures Department. Dr. Cappas-Toro has worked in higher education across the U.S. promoting institutional practices, policies, and programming to best serve incarcerated, first-generation, and eHSI (emerging Hispanic serving institution) learners.
View Bio
Tivia Collins
she/her
Tivia Collins
Dr. Tivia Collins is an assistant professor in the women's gender and sexuality studies department at Wake Forest University. She is also affiliate faculty in the African American studies program at Wake Forest University and in the International Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies at The University of Guyana. Tivia holds a PhD in interdisciplinary gender studies from the University of the West Indies. Her research and teaching centres black transnational and diasporic feminisms, postcolonial feminist studies, citizenship studies and Caribbean feminist praxis. Her current research focuses on Caribbean migrant women’s lived experiences of borders, citizenship, non/belonging and home.
View Bio
Karen Flyn
she/her
Karen Flyn
Karen Flynn is the Terrance & Karyn Holm endowed professor in the department of population health nursing science at the University of Illinois, Chicago, college of nursing and director of the Midwest Nursing History Research Center. Her research lies at the intersection of Black feminist and diaspora studies, health and care work, nursing history, and transnational mobilities with keen attention to race, gender, and equity. Her award-winning book Moving Beyond Borders: Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the African Canadian Diaspora (University of Toronto, 2011) is the first book-length manuscript that examines the experiences of Black Canadian and Caribbean nurses and the transnational formation of the occupation. She is currently working on several projects, including a manuscript about Black English as foreign language teachers in East Asia and the gendered and racialized impact of COVID-19.
View Bio
Kamille Gentles-Peart
she/her
Kamille Gentles-Peart
Dr. Kamille Gentles-Peart is a Fulbright Scholar and professor of critical communication studies at Roger Williams University. Her research centers thick Black Caribbean women, and the ways in which they experience, negotiate, disrupt, and resist misogynoir in their everyday lives. She is the author of Romance with Voluptuousness: Caribbean Women and Thick Bodies in the United States (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). Her work has also appeared in journals such as Women’s Studies Quarterly, Feminism and Psychology, and Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. Dr. Gentles-Peart is also an organizer of the Black Women and Girls Symposium, and co-founder and co-director the North Star Collective, a regional consortium with the New England Board of Higher Education to promote reparative justice and uplift BIPOC faculty in New England.
View Bio
Julia S. Jordan-Zachery
she/her
Julia S. Jordan-Zachery
Julia S. Jordan-Zachery is professor and chair of the women's, gender and sexuality studies department at Wake Forest University. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on African American women and public policy. She is the author of the award-winning book "Black Women, Cultural Images and Social Policy," "Shadow Bodies: Black Women, Ideology, Representation, and Politics," and "Erotic Testimonies: Black Women Daring to be Wild and Free," and several articles and edited volumes, including "Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag," "Black women and da ‘Rona" and “Lavender Fields: Black Women Experiencing Fear, Agency, and Hope in the Time of COVID-19”. Jordan-Zachery has also produced the award documentary Healing Roots.
View Bio
Sabine Lamour
she/her
Sabine Lamour
Sabine Lamour is a sociologist trained in France and Haiti. She is currently a visiting professor at Brown University. She is interested in themes such as the epistemology of point of view, participatory perspective, grounded theory, materialist feminism, Afro-feminism and decolonial feminism. Since 2018, she has been a professor at the Université d'État d'Haïti (UEH). She has also worked with women's organizations as a feminist activist, trainer, independent consultant in both rural and urban settings. She is the former national coordinator (2017-2022) of the feminist organization SOFA.
View Bio
Marcelle Medford
she/her
Marcelle Medford
A sociologist and ethnographer, I center the cultural agency of racialized migrants in my research on Black belonging. My commitment to a liberation sociology shows up in my two current lines of research on Black immigrant placemaking. The first line stems from my Chicago-based research on Black Jamaican immigrants taking space to carve out joy and practice resistance. The second emerges from my community work with Black immigrant activists, politicians, and organizers in Maine pursuing self-making. The through-line in both projects is the dynamic relationship between diverse Black populations, across dimensions of migration, citizenship status, and nationality.
View Bio
Ocqua Gerlyn Murrell
she/they
Ocqua Gerlyn Murrell
Ocqua Gerlyn Murrell (she/they) is a sociologist, Black/Caribbean queer feminist, curator, and assistant professor in the gender, sexuality, and women's studies department at the University of Florida. Her work is inspired by her own transnational girlhood between the States, La Republica Dominicana, and the island of Sint Maarten. She co-creates knowledge with Afro-Caribbean girls in the Dutch West Indies to explore how they narrate, navigate, and negotiate their girlhood experiences. She also explores the transitional period between girlhood and woman/adulthood. Her other research and teaching interests include sex education curricula, reproductive justice, Black/Caribbean/transnational feminisms, social inequality, gender relations, women’s studies, queer studies, and sex work. Her work aims to raise the volume and increase the visibility of Black women, girls, and LGBTQ+ folx stories and lived experiences in the west and from the global south.
View Bio
Mamyrah Prosper
she/her
Mamyrah Prosper
Dr Mamyrah Dougé-Prosper is an assistant professor of global and international studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is also the director of the Center for Racial Justice at UCI. Dougé-Prosper’s work generally focuses on Black social movements. More specifically, her research centers around protest movements in 21st century Haiti. Dougé-Prosper has published in political magazines such as Black Agenda Report, LeftEast, and NACLA as well as academic journals such as Women's Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, Kalfou, and the Journal of Haitian Studies. She is completing her first manuscript titled “Development Arrested in Occupied Haiti: Social Movements and the Gangster State.”
View Bio
Leah Ramnath
she/her
Leah Ramnath
Leah Ramnath is a Black Feminist Eco Lab fellow in the School for Cultural & Social Transformation, University of Utah. She holds a PhD in social and cultural thought from Virginia Tech. Her research aims to advance the field of Black feminist methodologies, articulating alternative life-worlds from Afro and Indo-Caribbean women’s literature that challenges and transcends colonial and imperial projects. Her recent publications include “Cynical (Dis)Positions: Cultivating Cynical Sensibilities” in Black Feminist Theorizing Toward Futurity: A Standpoints Volume, Virginia Tech Publishing, and “The Caribbean Woman as Non-citizen: The Caribbean Feminist as Cynic” in The Routledge Companion to Gender in the Caribbean, Routledge (forthcoming).
View Bio
Aleah N. Ranjitsingh
she/her
Aleah N. Ranjitsingh
Aleah N. Ranjitsingh, Ph.D. is an assistant professor in the Africana studies department and Caribbean studies program at Brooklyn College, City University of New York (CUNY). She received her Ph.D. in the field of interdisciplinary gender studies from the Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS), University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. Her research focuses on the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora, and her areas of interest include identity and identity formation, gender and ethnic identities, mixedness, and the processes of racialization at "home" in the Caribbean and in the diaspora. She has published in the Journal for Intercultural Studies, the Caribbean Journal of International Relations and Diplomacy, and the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies. She is the co-author of Dougla in the 21st Century: Adding to the Mix, a study of race and the mixed race Dougla identity in the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora, which was published by the University of Mississippi Press in June 2021. Her edited collection The Asian Caribbean in the Caribbean Diaspora: Essays on Migration, Identity, and Literary and Cultural Representations is forthcoming (Lexington Books, 2025).
View Bio
Sadiyah M. Wallace
she/her
Sadiyah M. Wallace
Sadiyah M. Wallace is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research centers the particularities of power, intersectionality, sexualities, violence, empire, and the afterlives of colonialism. A community-worker turned ethnographer, she combines multimodal and interdisciplinary approaches rooted in Black, Caribbean, and transnational feminist traditions. Her current project centers the lived experiences of Black girls attending high school in Kingston, Jamaica, as they navigate the transition to adulthood against the backdrop of Jamaica’s colonial history and contemporary social violence. She particularly attends to how the legacies of colonialism and enslavement, hyper-sexualization, reproductive coercion, social control, and moral imperialism shape and mirror their lives, and how girls confront and resist these impositions. Thank you to our sponsors
