8th Gordon K. & Sybil Lewis Annual Memorial Lecture

Welcome to Paradise: Neoliberalism, Violence and the Social Gender Crisis in the Caribbean

THURSDAY, APRIL 11 • 1:00 – 3:30 P.M.
Room REB 238 • Ramón Emeterio Betances (REB) Building
College of Social Sciences, UPR-RP

Presenter: Dr. Rhoda Reddock
Professor Emerita, Gender Social Change and Development
The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago

This presentation provides an intersectional analysis of the emergence of neo-liberalism and its multi-faceted impact globally, with special reference to the Caribbean region. It highlights the social and gendered impact of neoliberal global restructuring on the lives of Caribbean peoples drawing a parallel with similar developments over the 20th Century. It challenges the current global political orthodoxy characterized by the ‘Washington consensus’ by linking its many facets and the ways in which they all facilitate and reinforce each other. In particular, it seeks to re-introduce ‘the social’, ‘the gendered’ and the ‘global political economy’ into discourses on the endemic violence and social deterioration confronting the region. In so doing it interrogates the social, economic and gendered determinants of contemporary social inequalities and violence and the criminal justice response that has predominated.