Online Special Issue: 2A

45.2A “Fresh” Online

Guest editors: Tonya Haynes, Halimah A. F. DeShong, & Andrea N. Baldwin
Cover Art: Spellbound, Mixed Media, © Simone Asia, 2020.

This collection confronts urgent contemporary political questions, harnessing feminist perspectives and centering the experiences, strategies, and thinking technologies from the Caribbean, Americas, and Africa. Fresh is a movement text for our hyper-connected world. This accessible collection of personal essays, creative nonfiction, and scholarly writing for a popular audience convenes artists, activists, writers, troublemakers, scholars, and everyday people living on the frontlines of intersecting relations of power to confront issues not adequately addressed in the existing scholarship. Fresh features urgent feminist and queer mediations on migration, erotic autonomy, violence, gender, race, feminist movements, knowledge, and how we make life in light of, in spite of, and beyond the multiple and interconnected prisms/prisons of power which constrain the majority. Fresh is uncompromising in claiming space for thought, action, and change from the perspectives of racialized women, girls, and gender expansive people; doing so by harnessing the power, spirit, value, and complexities of feminist networking and solidarities.

Fresh.

In the nation languages of the English-speaking Caribbean, “fresh” indexes recentness and newness, but also the opportunity to come again, harder than before. It connotes boldness, impertinence, and promiscuity—a shameless disrespect for propriety, for knowing one’s place. Across the artwork and articles in the Frontiers print journal and the essays in Frontiers Augmented online, guest editors Tonya Haynes, Halimah A. F. DeShong, and Andrea N. Baldwin center public scholarship, serving up fresh voices and perspectives. They seek to both offer something new and to return to well-worn themes with a clear and unfaltering voice.

About the Editors

Tonya Haynes

Tonya Haynes is a lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies: Nita Barrow Unit, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. Her research examines Caribbean feminisms and Caribbean feminist thought.

Halimah A. F. DeShong

THalimah A. F. DeShong is senior lecturer and head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies: Nita Barrow Unit at The University of the West Indies (The UWI), Cave Hill Campus. She recently served as ambassador and second deputy permanent representative at the Permanent Mission of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to the United Nations for her country’s tenure on the UN Security Council. An experienced feminist researcher, she specializes in gendered violence, feminist methodologies, anti-colonial feminisms, qualitative interviewing, and the analysis of talk and text. She is co-editor of the books Interdisciplinary Perspectives on COVID-19 and the Caribbean, Volume 1: The State, Economy and Health; Interdisciplinary Perspectives on COVID-19 and the Caribbean, Volume 2: Society, Education and Human Behaviour, both published Palgrave Macmillan in 2023; and Methodologies in Caribbean Research on Gender & Sexuality (Ian Randle Publishers, 2021). In addition to her published research on violence and feminist methodologies, she has advised Caribbean governments on gender-based violence (GBV) policies and laws, is the author of the Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) National Gender-based Violence Action Plan and has jointly designed a GBV/HFLE curriculum for post-secondary school students in SVG. She was the lead researcher and author of the qualitative component of the UN Women/CARICOM/Caribbean Development Bank Womens Health Survey on violence against women in Grenada. She currently chairs Barbados’ National Advisory Council on Gender. Animating her teaching, research, and outreach is a concern for ending the enduring effects of complex systems of violence in Caribbean societies.

Andrea N. Baldwin

Andrea N. Baldwin is an associate professor in the Divisions of Gender and Ethnic Studies in the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah. She is an attorney-at-law who holds a master’s degree in international trade policy and a PhD in gender and development studies from the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus in Barbados. Dr. Baldwin’s research interest includes Black, decolonial, and Caribbean feminist theorizing.

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