A first of its kind in the English-speaking Caribbean, this multi-disciplinary collection brings together contributions from a variety of Caribbean-based and diasporic researchers and activists about the main methods used in existing feminist research practice. Comprising 29 chapters organized around 7 main themes - History & Historiography; Methodologies for Feminist Organizing & Action Research; Researching Gender; Researching Sexualities; Researching the Visual & Cultural; Methods for Analysing Talk & Text; and Reflections on Positionality - this book brings together canonical texts on Caribbean gender and sexuality research methods and methodology, recent research on digital cultures and critical reflections on positionality in fieldwork. The collection reveals both the embrace of multiple methods by Caribbean researchers and the limitations that the need to produce detailed and comprehensive knowledge about gender and sexuality imposes on the research process. It is an invaluable resource for university students, for teaching purposes in women, gender and sexuality studies, and methods courses.

As academics in postcolonial Caribbean countries, we have been trained to believe that research should be objective: a measurable benefit to the public good and quantifiable in nature so as to generalize findings to develop knowledge societies for economic growth. What happens, however when the very word “research” connotes a derogatory term or semblance of distrust? Smith (1999) speaks towards the distrustful nature of the term as a legacy of European imperialism and colonialism. Against this backdrop, how do Caribbean researchers leverage recognized and valued (indigenous) methods of knowing and understanding for and by the Caribbean populace? How do we learn from indigenous research methods such as Kaupapa Maori (Smith, 1999) and develop an understanding of research that is emancipatory in nature? Decolonizing qualitative methods are rooted in critical theory and grounded in social justice, resistance, change and emancipatory research for and by the Other (Said, 1978). Rodney’s (1969) legacy of “groundings” provides a Caribbean oriented ethnographic approach to collecting data about people and culture. It is an anti-imperialist method of data collection focused on the socioeconomic and political environment within the (post) colonial context. Similar to Rodney, other critical Caribbean scholars have moved the research discourse to center on the notions of resistance, struggle (Chevannes, 1995; Feraria, 2009) and decolonoizing methodologies. This proposed edited volume will provide a collective body of scholarship for innovative uses of decolonizing qualitative research. In order to theorize and conduct decolonizing research, one can argue that the researcher as self and as the Other needs to be interrogated. Borrowing from an autoethnographic ontology, the researcher or investigator recognizes the self as the unit of measure, and there is a concerted effort to continuously see the self, seeing the self through and as the other (Alexander, 2005; Ellis, 2004). This level of interrogation may require frameworks such as Reasonable Humanism in which there is a clear understanding of the role of the researcher and researched from a physiological and psychosocial standpoint. Thereafter, the researcher is better prepared to enter into a discourse about decolonizing methodologies. The origins of qualitative inquiry in the Caribbean can be traced to political and economic discourses – Marxism, postcolonialism, neocolonialism, capitalism, liberalism, postmodernism- which have challenged ways of knowing and the construction of knowledge. Evans (2009) traced the origins of qualitative inquiry to slave narratives, proprietor’s journals, missionaries’ reports and travelogues. Common to the Caribbean is an understanding of how colonial legacies of research have ridiculed oral traditions, language, and ways of knowing, often rendering them valueless and inconsequential. This proposed edited volume acknowledges the significance of decolonizing approaches to qualitative research in the Caribbean and the wider Caribbean diaspora. It includes an audience of scholars, teacher/ researchers and students primarily in and across the humanities, social sciences and educational studies. This proposed volume would provide much needed knowledge and best practice strategies to the community of researchers engaged in decolonizing methodologies. Additionally, this volume will allow readers to think of new imaginings of research design that deconstruct power and privilege to benefit knowledge, communities and participants. It will spark key objectives, directions and frameworks for deeper discussions and interrogations of normative, westernized and hegemonic approaches to qualitative research. Lastly, the volume will welcome empirical studies of application of decolonizing methodologies and theoretical studies that frame critical discourse.

Affirming Methodologies: Research and Education in the Caribbean centres local and indigenous ways of knowing in research and education praxis in the Caribbean. The research methodologies and pedagogies are presented in this book within an Affirming Methodologies framework. They bring forward localized epistemologies whereby Caribbean ways of being and knowing are affirmed, and the expected western hierarchies between researcher and researched are removed. The chapters present approaches to knowledge construction and knowledge sharing based on practices, lived experiences, traditions, language patterns, and rituals of Caribbean communities. The importance of an Affirming Methodologies approach is demonstrated, and the characteristics of culturally affirming research methodologies and pedagogies in diverse environments including Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and the Caribbean diaspora in Aotearoa New Zealand and Canada are explored and presented. Grounded on an understanding of the authors’ Caribbean positionality, ontological distinctions within the Caribbean research context are considered. This book moves forward from a decolonizing methodology approach, and, as such, the chapters are written, not in opposition to, or tested against Eurocentric approaches to research, but deeply rooted in a Caribbean ethos. This book will engage researchers (both qualitative and quantitative), postgraduate students, academics, practitioners, policymakers, community workers, and lay persons who seek to employ culturally relevant local and indigenous research approaches in their work. Each chapter offers practical suggestions on the 'how' of research practice, making them accessible, relevant, and flexible for novice and seasoned researchers alike.

Collection of essays that "consider the distinctive needs of research in Caribbean literature, language and culture and focus on honing research methods relevant to Caribbean material and the insights of the Caribbean experience".

A mosaic is the only image which can do justice to museums in the Caribbean. They are as diverse and plentiful as the many communities which form the cores of their organizations and the hearts of their missions. These profoundly social museums adopt participatory practices and embark on community engagement processes in order to embed themselves firmly in contemporary Caribbean societies.0This dissertation presents a mosaic of 195 Caribbean museums and the results of a unique research project based on a mixed methods approach. It begins with a macro view of Caribbean museums and their participatory practices. This part of the study consisted of a regional museum survey in which the museum visit was approached as an event, leading to the creation of an extensive database of Caribbean museums and their participatory practices. The dissertation continues by zooming in to a micro level to explore the dynamics of community engagement processes in two case studies. The Kalinago Barana Autê in Dominica shows the ongoing process of an indigenous grassroots initiative that became a governmentally owned but locally managed museum. The Bengal to Barbados exhibition in Barbados reveals the complex dynamics of the beginnings of a co-curation project between a heterogeneous migrant community and a national museum.

By approaching the colonial Caribbean as an interconnected region, Tessa Murphy recasts small islands as the site of broader contests over Indigenous dominion, racial belonging, economic development, and colonial subjecthood.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey invokes the cyclical model of the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean (‘tidalectics’) to destabilize the national, ethnic, and even regional frameworks that have been the mainstays of literary study. The result is a privileging of alter/native epistemologies whereby island cultures are positioned where they should have been all along—at the forefront of the world historical process of transoceanic migration and landfall. The research, determination, and intellectual dexterity that infuse this nuanced and meticulous reading of Pacific and Caribbean literature invigorate and deepen our interest in and appreciation of island literature. —Vilsoni Hereniko, University of Hawai‘i "Elizabeth DeLoughrey brings contemporary hybridity, diaspora, and globalization theory to bear on ideas of indigeneity to show the complexities of ‘native’ identities and rights and their grounded opposition as ‘indigenous regionalism’ to free-floating globalized cosmopolitanism. Her models are instructive for all postcolonial readers in an age of transnational migrations." —Paul Sharrad, University of Wollongong, Australia Routes and Roots is the first comparative study of Caribbean and Pacific Island literatures and the first work to bring indigenous and diaspora literary studies together in a sustained dialogue. Taking the "tidalectic" between land and sea as a dynamic starting point, Elizabeth DeLoughrey foregrounds geography and history in her exploration of how island writers inscribe the complex relation between routes and roots. The first section looks at the sea as history in literatures of the Atlantic middle passage and Pacific Island voyaging, theorizing the transoceanic imaginary. The second section turns to the land to examine indigenous epistemologies in nation-building literatures. Both sections are particularly attentive to the ways in which the metaphors of routes and roots are gendered, exploring how masculine travelers are naturalized through their voyages across feminized lands and seas. This methodology of charting transoceanic migration and landfall helps elucidate how theories and people travel, positioning island cultures in the world historical process. In fact, DeLoughrey demonstrates how these tropical island cultures helped constitute the very metropoles that deemed them peripheral to modernity. Fresh in its ideas, original in its approach, Routes and Roots engages broadly with history, anthropology, and feminist, postcolonial, Caribbean, and Pacific literary and cultural studies. It productively traverses diaspora and indigenous studies in a way that will facilitate broader discussion between these often segregated disciplines.