Speakers:
Warren Harding is a Jamaican-born, U.S. raised writer and educator. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, studying practices of reading among Black Caribbean women writers and cultural producers between the 1970s and 1990s. In particular, Warren is interested in the ways in which these women's works negotiate the borders of imagined and built geographies to advocate for racial equity, gender justice, and immigrant rights across the African and Caribbean diasporas. His research has taken him to Canada, Cuba, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago.
Kamala Kempadoo is Professor in the Department of Social Science at York University, Canada and the 2021 Cogut Visiting Professor in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University. She teaches in the areas of Caribbean Studies, Black Radical and Black Feminist Thought, and Critical Antitrafficking Studies, and researches and speaks internationally on migrant and sex workers’ rights and anti-trafficking discourses. She is author and editor of various publications on the Caribbean and the global sex trade, including the books, Sexing the Caribbean: Race, Gender and Sexual Labour and Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance and Redefinition, and is currently co-editing a book with Brown professor Elena Shih, on racism, coloniality and anti-trafficking. She is the 2018 recipient of the Caribbean Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
Halimah A.F. DeShong is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies: Nita Barrow Unit of The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados. She has researched, published, taught and developed courses on feminist methodologies and epistemologies, qualitative research, gendered violence, feminist theory, and men and masculinities in the Caribbean. She is editor, co-editor and author of four special issues of academic journals, and numerous journal articles and book chapters. Halimah has worked with Caribbean governments, development agencies and civil society on gender-based violence action plans, research, policy, law and curriculum. For the period 2020-2021, she is Ambassador and Second Deputy Permanent Representative at the Permanent Mission of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines on the United Nations Security Council.
Patsy Lewis, Director, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, will introduce the event.
