Gabrielle Hosein has spent twenty years in Caribbean feminist movement-building. She began using poetry and Rapso as part of the Ten Sisters Spoken Word Movement between 2000 and 2004. In 2005, she created Steppin Up: A Feminist Movement-Building Game, which has been played by Caribbean participants from Cuba to Suriname, and has been part of the curriculum of the IGDS Cave Hill Campus Caribbean Institute in Gender and Development regional training for more than a decade. Her teaching has particularly focused on participatory approaches to consciousness raising, strategy sharing and solidarity building among UWI students with the creation of activist ‘popular actions’ as assignments since 2006. Focusing her research since 1999 on areas such as girlhood, women and political power, Indo-Caribbean feminisms and, more recently, Caribbean feminist solidarity with Indigenous People’s struggles, her most recent edited collections are Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (co-edited with Lisa Outar), and Negotiating Gender, Policy and Politics in the Caribbean: Feminist Strategies, Masculinist Resistance and Transformational Possibilities (co-edited with Jane Parpart). Her forthcoming edited collection, Indigenous Geographies and Caribbean Feminisms: Common Struggles Against Global Capitalism is co-edited with Levi Gahman. Faculty at the IGDS St. Augustine since 2005 after being among the first graduate students of the Institute in 1997, she has provided guidance as Associate and now Executive Editor of the UWI’s first open access, on line journal, the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies (CRGS) since 2009. In 2011, she began to write publicly about Caribbean womanhood and citizenship in her blog/Guardian column, ‘Diary of a Mothering Worker’. Since 2016, she has been the Head of the IGDS, St Augustine Unit and her focus is on envisioning a generational transition which builds on a strong history of research, teaching and advocacy while expanding the Institute’s leadership in Caribbean cyberfeminisms, gender-based violence, gender-responsive budgeting, masculinities and other areas since. Under her headship, the IGDS has strengthened its undergraduate mentorship activities, known as ‘IGDS Ignite!’, has broadened its professional preparation of graduate students in what’s called a ‘IGDS CV+ approach, has expanded its on-line reach through its #sparkfeminism use of Facebook, Instagram, electronic billboards, radio and other media; and has added a focus on gender responsive budgeting and gender, peace and security to its areas of capacity-building and collaboration. This year the IGDS conceptualised two campaigns for International Women’s Day, #speakyourtruth, which contained content focused on women’s rights as everyone’s responsibility; and #Caribbeanmencan, which provided messages across a range of issues as part of a call for vocal and visible solidarity from men. As well, for the second year, the IGDS SAU played a key role in organizing a national rally and march for International Women’s Day.
Publications and Scholarly Work
Chapters in Refereed Books
2016 Hosein, Gabrielle. Dougla Poetics and Politics in Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Reflection and Reconceptualization. In Hosein, Gabrielle and Lisa Outar. Eds. Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Theories, Genealogies, Enactments. Palgrave. 2016. Pgs. 245- 269.
2016 Hosein, Gabrielle. A Will To Power: The Anglophone Caribbean Struggle to Advance Women’s Political Leadership. In Hosein, Gabrielle and Jane Parpart (eds.) Negotiating Gender, Policy and Politics: Feminist Strategies, Masculinist Resistances and Transformational Possibilities in the Caribbean, (Rowland and Littlefield).
2015 Hosein, Gabrielle. Democracy, Gender and Indian Muslim Modernity in Trinidad, in Islam and the Americas, edited by Aisha Khan. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 249-268.
2012 Hosein, Gabrielle. Activism in Academia: Twenty-first Century Caribbean Feminist Dilemmas, in Love and Power: Caribbean Discourses on Gender, edited by Eudine Barriteau, Kingston, Jamaica: UWI Press.
2011 Hosein, Gabrielle. No Pure Place for Resistance: Reflections on Being Ms. Mastana Bahar 2000, in Bindi: The Multifaceted Lives of Indo-Caribbean Women, edited by Rosanne Kanhai, UWI Press: Kingston, Jamaica.
2009 Hosein, Gabrielle. Food, Family, Art and God: Aesthetic Authority in Public Life, in Anthropology and Individuals, edited by Daniel Miller, London: Berg.
2009 Hosein, Gabrielle. Insider Experiences and Ethnographic Knowledge: Reflections from Trinidad, in Fieldwork Identities in the Caribbean, edited by Erin Taylor. Florida: Caribbean Studies Press.
2004 Hosein, Gabrielle. Ambivalent Aspirations: Assertion and Accommodation in Indo-Trinidadian Girls’ Lives. In Barbara Bailey and Elsa Leo-Rhynie, eds., Gender in the Twentieth Century: Caribbean Perspectives, Visions and Possibilities. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle.
Forthcoming Articles in Refereed Journals
2016 Hosein, Gabrielle. Post-Indentureship Feminist Thought, in Scholar and Feminist Online, Special Issue edited by Tami Navarro and Tonya Haynes
Other Publications in Refereed Journals
2014 Hosein, Gabrielle. Film Review. Earth, Water, Woman: Community & Sustainability in Trinidad: Sarah Feinbloom and Alexandra Swati Guild, dirs. 23 min. Sarafina Productions, Los Angeles, CA. Distributor: Good Docs, Los Angeles, CA, 2013. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aman.12158/abstract American Anthropologist. Vol. 116, No. 4, pp. 1–2
2010 Hosein, Gabrielle. ‘Ketch Dis’: Envisioning Alternatives to Gender Based Violence in the Caribbean. Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, Issue 4, 1-5.
http://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/february2010/journals/KetchDis.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgcGGGekafE
2008 Hosein, Gabrielle. “Speak Out!”: Feminist Activism from Behind the Scenes, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, Issue 2, 1 – 7.
http://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/september2008/journals/GabrielleHosein-VideoEssay.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WXPtu5–d0
2007 Hosein, Gabrielle. Masculinities in Motion: A Photo Essay. In Patricia Mohammed, ed. Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, 1, 1 – 6.
2007 Hosein, Gabrielle. Survival Stories: Challenges Facing Youth in Trinidad and Tobago. In Alissa Trotz and Aaron Kamugisha, eds., Special Issue of the Journal of Race and Class: Caribbean Trajectories 200 Years On, 49, 2, 125 – 130.
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