CONTACT: annafeign@berkeley.edu; jannamare_lue@berkeley.edu; neena.albarus@berkeley.edu
The Caribbean Coalition at Berkeley seeks to foster intraregional community and dialogue among graduate students, faculty, and staff members who identify with and/or are in solidarity with Caribbean peoples and support their self-determined futures. The Caribbean Studies Working Group emerges from a broader effort to build sustained, interdisciplinary, and interdepartmental engagement with Caribbean thought at UC Berkeley. Intellectually, we center the Caribbean as a site of theory and praxis and a commitment to the self-determination of Caribbean peoples. We engage with the work of foundational and emerging scholars, artists, and activists who explore topics such as sovereignty, environmental and climate justice, coloniality, repair, mutual care, and radical imagination. Our research across the working group explores topics such as disaster, infrastructure, extractivism, and repair; Blackness, embodiment, and illness; forced migration, care, and educational precarity; and the sonic and poetic ecologies of Caribbean life. Together, we ask: How do Caribbean communities contend with ongoing colonial, structural, environmental, and racial violence? What forms of knowledge, resistance, and worldmaking emerge in response? Broadly, we hope to foster a generative space that supports students, faculty, and community partners to develop work-in-progress and cultivate new projects across fields and institutions grounded in Caribbean intellectual and creative traditions.