Gabrielle Jamela Hosein is a feminist activist and academic. She holds a B.A. in Political Science from University of Toronto and an M.Phil in Gender and Development Studies from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, and she completed a PhD in Anthropology at University College London, UK in 2008. She has published chapters/articles in the following books/journals: ‘Gender in the Twenty-first Century’ (2004), ‘Race and Class’ (2008), ‘Anthropology and Individuals’ (2009) and ‘Fieldwork Identities’ (2009), and edited the second issue of the open access on-line journal, ‘The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies’ (2008). Her PhD thesis ethnographically explored politics in public life in San Fernando, Trinidad. It focused on the negotiation of authority and governance in settings ranging from a vegetable market and a squatting community to a Carnival mas camp and a local mosque.

She is active in the Caribbean youth, poetry and feminist movements and has been designing feminist workshops since 2002. Her poetry is featured on three locally-produced albums and in the 2005 Zed Press publication, ‘Defending Our Dreams: Global Feminist Voices for a New Generation’. She co-created two documentaries focusing on ethnographic research on issues of sustainability, gender and development in the Nariva Swamp (a RAMSAR site in Trinidad) in 2002 and 2005. In 2007, she co-hosted the current affairs television series, “New Voices”, on Gayelle TV and she has recently started a political commentary video blog. Her activist work is currently focused on feminist movement building. She is a Lecturer at the Institute of Gender and Development Studies, The University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago.

“As a young scholar interested in and active on issues of governance and democracy, I am excited to be able to participate in the workshop because I think that I will learn a great deal about how I can add global context to my own research on politics in Trinidad, and also push my thinking in more comparative directions.  Right now, especially in relation to the Caribbean, I am questioning ‘resistance’ as a starting point for understanding how women and men participate in political society   I am interested in how ‘ordinary’ people claim and exercise forms of state authority, and the ways that emotions enable them to legitimize what they do. I’ve found they compel us to think carefully about how people conceptualise democracy and the other political values that explain why particular forms may or may not be considered important. I suppose that having only recently finished my Ph.D, I’m now asking questions about the implications of my research for theorising about global governance and also for understanding political strategy at levels from the local to the international. So, I’m coming to reflect on my research so far, learn from more experienced scholars, and see how both my activist and academic work speaks to global discussions about political power.”

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