Event

The Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS) presents the Graduate Research Seminar for Merisa Thompson, PhD in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies on the topic “Between State and Capital: Gender and the Political Economy 
of Food in Trinidad.”

This event takes place from 10 to 11am.

For a printable version of this information, click here.

Abstract:

This study undertakes a gendered analysis of how power is mobilised and dispersed in the post-colonial food economy of Trinidad. It focuses on unraveling the power relations between the state, capital and food producers, and how relations of gender, race, class and nation mediate these relations. It does this by exploring the interactions that take place around two groups of food that are seen to form part of a nations' core food requirement - livestock, and particularly dairy, and fish. Within these complexes it explores how dominant arrangements of power structure who gets what and why, and what is valued and why, and how actors construct and reconstruct social relations in order to transform, manipulate or maintain their position in relation to dominant structures of power. It explores the convergences and divergences of local subsistence practices and global industrialising processes, and examines the way in which different actors define and negotiate their position in a food economy that is dominated by market-centric discourses of food security and agricultural industrialisation. This seminar introduces the theoretical underpinnings of the research, the empirical work done so far, and some preliminary findings that have begun to emerge.

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