Barbados: Engaging Caribbean Development

About Syllabus Faculty Profile About CIGAD


About

This course is an exploration of different ways of conceptualizing the relationships between gender and labor over time, including critiques linking gendered labor to race and class. Grounded primarily in ethnography and political economy, we will look at some of the changes and continuities in the relationship between gender and forms of labor ranging from industrial labor to affective labor/care work in the African Diaspora, particularly the Caribbean and Latin America.

This course is sponsored by the Caribbean Institute in Gender and Development. View the complete summer 2019 training program curriculum.

The objectives of this course are to:

  • Introduce students to paradigm shifts affecting the Caribbean region
  • Help students develop the analytical skills necessary to think critically the intersections of race, gender, color, class, and development.
  • Help students to understand how development initiatives are rooted in processes of racialization and histories of colonialism.


Syllabus

Reading

  • Harrison, Faye “The Gendered Politics and Violence of Structural Adjustment: A View from Jamaica,” pp. 451-468. In Situated Lives: Gender and Culture in Everyday Life
  • Bolles, Lynn. 1983.  “Kitchens Hit by Priorities: Employed Working Class Jamaican Women Confront the IMF” (Chapter 6 in Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor)

Class Schedule 

  • Overview of Industrialization
    • Race and Gender Implications of Industry
    • Shortcomings of this model
  • Shift to Nationalization (moment of independence across the region)
    • Limits of this model
  • Neoliberalism as Development
    • Continued Feminization of Labor
    • Increased stratification along lines of race/class/color


Faculty Profile 

Tami Navarro is the Associate Director of BCRW, Managing Editor of the Center’s online journal, Scholar and Feminist Online, and Director of BCRW’s Transnational Feminisms Initiative. She holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University and is currently at work on a manuscript entitled Virgin Capital: Financial Services as Development in the US Virgin Islands.


About CIGAD

The Caribbean Institute in Gender & Development (CIGAD) is the region’s premier gender and development training programme. The programme is now in its 13th cycle. It is hosted by the Institute for Gender & Development Studies: Nita Barrow Unit of the University of the West Indies.