D. Alissa Trotz

Alissa Trotz is a Professor of Caribbean Studies at New College and the Director of Women and Gender Studies. She is also affiliate faculty at the Dame Nita Barrow Institute of Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados; and a member of the O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination, and Global Health. She is a resource person with Red Thread Women’s Organization in Guyana and editor of “In the Diaspora,” a weekly newspaper column in the Guyanese daily, Stabroek News. Alissa’s work is situated within a tradition of feminist political economy, and a Caribbean feminist tradition in particular, that takes an intersectional approach to social reproduction as a starting point and node of interrogation to think through histories and processes of dispossession and their contemporary manifestations. Her research trajectory unfolds across related themes that address processes of social reproduction, neoliberalisation & Caribbean feminisms; coloniality, racial formations, gendered difference and violence; transnational migration, remittances and diaspora engagement; and Caribbean knowledge production.

Her current research looks at diaspora, indigeneity and extractivism in colonial Guyana. A consistent thread – and method – is to track local, regional and transnational strategies of survival/survivance that are prompted by localized insecurities, the deep and everyday injuries of neoliberalism. What does it mean to hold space open for imagining what insurgent knowledges might emerge when we attend closely to what sociologist and Caribbeanist Cecilia Green describes as the “nooks and crannies and living networks of the popular and domestic economy and its creative potential,” the deeply gendered practices that make heartbreakingly visible the violence of capitalism and sovereignty, all while still stubbornly reaching for other, affirming models of human-ness and value?