A picture of Emerita Professor Rhoda Reddock would probably suffice next to a dictionary definition of the word “tireless”. Since wrapping up a three-decade career at The UWI in the areas of gender, social change and development, Prof Reddock continues to be just as busy.
"Retirement has meant that I have a bit more flexibility in my life to choose what I want to do. But I am still an active academic, writing papers, giving talks and of course, trying to complete book manuscripts.”
She is currently in her second term on the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). She is also serving a second term on the executive committee of the International Sociological Association.
Her contributions are recognised and honoured in several ways. Apart from national awards, in 2012, she was presented with an honorary doctorate from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, The UWI Vice-Chancellor's Award for Excellence, and the UWI-NGC Award for Most Impacting Research Project.
A more recent honour is a collection of reflections from her peers on her pioneering place in shaping Caribbean gender studies and social scholarship. They appear in a special section of the academic journal, Small Axe (March 2026). Four colleagues: Professor Kamala Kempadoo, Professor Carole Boyce Davies, Professor Jocelyne Guilbault, and Dr Gabrielle Hosein, contemplated their associations.
Kempadoo met Reddock in the Netherlands when she was just beginning doctoral work at the University of Amsterdam.
"I encountered a role model in person -- someone who thought and talked about the lives and struggles of working women in the Caribbean from a sociological perspective; [and] who was researching and making sense of the politics and intersections of race, class and gender," she wrote.
Boyce Davies recalls that she met Reddock at the unlikely place of a funeral in New York in 1993. It was the send-off service for Audre Lorde, whom Reddock knew as a member of the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA), which she co-founded in 1985. Lorde was an activist academic whose works were part of the mosaic foundation of Caribbean freedom. Boyce Davies wrote of their shared cultural novelty of being female PhDs in small island societies in the 1980s.
Guilbault, a Canadian ethnomusicologist, wrote that what most struck her “is her ability to identify the 'problem-space' ...but what became one of the defining characteristics of her writing is her insistence on knowing about history in order to understand the present."
"Her work, however, has involved not only the creation of archives but also, in many cases, the rewriting of existing archives by remediating the absences (or silencing) of women's labours." Accordingly, Reddock's works in both "the itinerary of discrimination" of women working in agriculture, and in the plantation economy "have clearly intended to re-member Caribbean history."
Hosein, whose introduction to Reddock came as a graduate student, highlighted that the professor's praxis included being "one of a few Afro-Caribbean feminist scholars researching Indian indenture history" and experiences in the region. Hosein returns to Reddock’s 1985 work, Freedom Denied: Indian Women and Indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, 1845-1917, each new academic year with her own undergraduate students.
Hosein wrote that Reddock's historical and sociological works on Indian ethnicity made her feel included, "as if Indo-Caribbean presence was not rendered through absence, marginalization, stereotype or passing mention." Rather, she has contributed to making Indian ethnicity "visible through attention to indenture and post indenture histories."
From a 2026 autobiographical account of her life, “Own Way,” also in Small Axe, Reddock recounts a life and career of more than seven decades filled with rich trails, cutting new tracks and crossing paths with other aspirants. Her early exposure to nonfiction books through her maternal grandfather, and library membership, could easily have been the starting point of her love for learning and education, which did not always coincide with the formal systems of examinations. By her own admission, she did not have conventional success at Bishop Anstey High School, nevertheless, its broad curricula and diverse intellectual content at the time, were important learning experiences.
Reddock's university years covered study at both The UWI St Augustine and Mona campuses, the latter being the place where she came to deeply understand the underpinnings of "radical politics and the beginnings of the feminist movement”.
Returning home in 1975, she was clear on her way ahead. In short order, she became a member of emerging women’s organisations which collaborated with the progressive union movement.
"We critiqued the authoritarianism, hierarchy, centralized power systems, machoism, sexism and resistance to feminist ideas."
Despite the frenetic pace, in 1978, Reddock left for The Hague to pursue a Master’s degree. After six years in The Netherlands that also covered doctoral work at the University of Amsterdam, she returned home in 1985 and joined ISER (now SALISES).
Her life and career trajectory had prepared her for entering The UWI system and the trials of cutting a path towards institutionalising gender studies, but before this, Reddock spent the early part of the 1990s in the Sociology Department. There, she introduced students to thinking critically about Caribbean society and produced a canonical text, Caribbean Sociology: An Introductory Reader, co-edited with Christine Barrow.
Institutionalisation of gender studies at UWI began to shape up in 1993 with Centres for Gender and Development across the three campuses. Peers, Patrica Mohammed was in Mona and Eudine Barriteau at Cave Hill while Reddock was placed at St Augustine in 1994.
Years later, Elsa Leo-Rhynie, Emerita Professor of Gender and Development Studies, would refer to gender studies as "an undisciplined discipline" as she documented the ways in which this programme insistently navigated UWI's traditional disciplinary and faculty-based structures to “transform rather than conform to its structures."
After leading the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the St Augustine campus from 1994–2008, Reddock moved into administration as Deputy Principal. This role was a "huge shift" for her, but she used her sociological training to transform and build new structures and systems which bring value to the campus and to the student experience today.
Since leaving all of that behind for so-called retirement, she has yet to ease into a slower pace.
When the CEDAW commitments come to an end, and after missing eight Carnivals from 2019 to 2026, she hopes to resume playing mas, visiting pan yards, calypso tents and attending Panorama.
"I think that the reason why I still do so much is that I enjoy this work, but really, I am going to carefully manage my time soon," she said with a cheeky smile.
