My curiosity starts and ends with imagination..

I started intentionally creating mixed media art to locate myself in my academic work. Before I became a social work educator, a researcher, or a psychotherapist I was an artist. Long before I became a visual artist, I was an actress and educational drama/theatre practitioner. My curiosity about the human experience deepened and widen through performance. I leaned into the complexity of human experience in theatre halls, community centres, basketball courts, and street corners throughout Trinidad and Tobago. Through embodiment, I learned (and continue to learn) about the complexity of relationality.

As a social scientist, I frame social problems through the lens of an artist, rooted in multiple identities and social locations including but not limited to my gender identity, racial identity, nationality, cultural location, and skin colour. These intersecting identities have shaped my experience and understanding of oppression, privilege, power dynamics, and the various manifestations of structural vulnerabilities encountered by people in the Caribbean and its diaspora. My teaching, research conceptualisations, data analysis, and critical reflexivity all begin from my positionality as a Black Trinidad-born woman, Pan-Africanist, shaped by the specific cultural landscape of Trinidad and Tobago. I am unapologetic about my commitment to social justice, anti-oppressive practice, community engagement, unpacking blackness, and the dimensions of gender-based violence experienced by women, girls, and gender non-conforming people. I rumble with academic and epistemic violence, steady in my resolve to privilege indigenous knowledge of and for the global South. I am determined to be a compassionate yet boundaried human who does academic work. Every day I am unlearning as much as I am learning about …

how to be present, and mindfully disruptive …

how to be present in my body …

how to be present in my communities …

how to care for myself and care for others….

how to create healing spaces …

how to remain committed to my body as a site of healing …

and making art is how I make sense of it all ….