Event

The Institute for Gender and Development Studies invites the campus community to "Graduate Research Seminars" happening this Friday from 11am to 2pm. 

 

Presentations from the following Doctoral candidates will occur: 

 

PhD in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies

 

 

The aim of this thesis is to unpack socio- political interventions into Afro- Caribbean family structures and roles during post- colonial transitional development in Trinidad and Tobago, and well into the post- Independence period.  It sets out to document, examine and test the merits and failures of socio- political policy that target familial groupings as the base unit of a wider development paradigm. The study seeks to analyze the results of these policy- making and policy- implementation efforts, in terms of how they in turn became a prime contributor to later state policy and state actions.

While introducing the thesis proposal, this seminar will also discuss the suitability of a feminist research methodology for this body of work. The social construction of gender has been an often subtle but highly pervasive force, which is continuously subject to transformation in response to economic and societal pressures. The family is a primary site of gender discourse. Understanding families as a unit of development transcend quantitative research strategies; their trajectories over the course of time requires a individualised approach that considers qualitative phenomena like location, income, beliefs and faith, external stressors and internal characteristics of the family unit. A feminist research design would facilitate a discussion of the complex interactions between the power of the state and the power of the family. An assumption of this research is that both the state and the family mutually impact each other, but are not necessarily on the same power spectrum. 

Supervisor: Prof. Patricia Mohammed

PhD in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies

 

 

This paper outlines the methodology, and its philosophical foundations, as well as an overview of the methods of this study of the religious experiences of Catholic Charismatic women in Trinidad. Interpretive/hermeneutic phenomenology and feminist research approach provides the framework for the study, to effectively access, and authentically reproduce and represent the experiences of the women. Feminist readings of the classical phenomenological approaches demonstrate their compatibility and utility in a feminist methodology. The qualitative research design is conceptualized as a spiral, as opposed to linear, in recognition of ways in which data collection and other stages of the research process will provide feedback which is useful in reviewing and revising the research design. Such revision gives the researcher opportunity to refine and refocus research questions and strategies to ensure greater validity, and also include unexpected and emergent issues and phenomena. The main methods used are participant observation and phenomenological in-depth interviews.

Supervisor: Prof. Rhoda Reddock

After these presentations there will a featured Guest Seminar. To find out more about that click here.