BCRW would like welcome Tami Navarro as our Associate Director. Tami holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Duke University and is also a proud graduate of Wesleyan University (’03). She is currently at work on a manuscript entitled Virgin Capital: Financial Services as Development in the US Virgin Islands, which engages with a local program (the Economic Development Commission, or EDC) to explore the ways that neoliberal initiatives are often built upon existing inequalities, particularly those related to gender and race. This project is based on 16 months of fieldwork Tami conducted in the US Virgin Islands, a time during which she worked closely in the newly-formed banking sector with a number of local women and one billionaire who was later convicted of using the EDC program to run a multi-million dollar fraud.
Before joining BCRW, Tami worked at the Women’s Coalition of St. Croix, a direct-service organization co-founded by Audre Lorde, an experience that solidified her commitment to feminist organizing. Just before coming to Barnard, Tami was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality (IRWGS) at Columbia University where she shared her work on contemporary development policies in the Caribbean in a talk entitled “Easy Money and Respectable Girls: Neoliberalism and Expectation in the US Virgin Islands” as part of IRWGS’s Embodiments of Science series. In this talk, she outlines the features and gendered effects of neoliberal policies in the Anglophone Caribbean.