Thursday 11th February 2021, 13:00-14:30 (GMT)
Poster ‘Caribbean migration to Britain’ CIMS
The Cultural Identity and Memory Studies Institute (CIMS) presents this webinar on ‘Caribbean migration to Britain’ via Zoom.
Professor Catherine O’Leary, Director of CIMS and from the School of Modern Languages, will chair the webinar, supported by Professor Huon Wardle, Department of Social Anthropology, who will moderate.
Speakers (in order of speaking):
Arthur Torrington (Chair of the Windrush Foundation)
Kaye Hall (Curator of Education, Barbados Museum and Historical Society)
Dr Laura Obermuller (The UWI Jamaica, Mona Campus)
Dr Shelene Gomes (The UWI Trinidad and Tobago, St Augustine Campus)
Dr Alan Miller (Computer Science, University of St Andrews)
This event is funded by the Scottish Funding Council SARRF award for “restarting” research hampered by the impacts of Covid-19.
Ticket information: Please email [email protected] to attend this event.
Speakers’ Bios:
Arthur Torrington CBE is a community advocate, and a co-founder (with the late Sam B. King MBE) of Windrush Foundation and The Equiano Society, which they established in 1996 in London. Through Windrush Foundation, a registered charity, Arthur promotes good race and community relations, and designs projects that celebrate the history and heritage of African people. Both organisations publicise the contributions of African and Caribbean men and women who settled in the UK before and after 22 June 1948, especially those who served King and Country in WWII. Also, Arthur’s work highlights the life and times of Olaudah Equiano, a former enslaved African known as Gustavus Vassa, the African, who was a businessman, explorer, human rights campaigner, best-selling, author, war-veteran and an abolitionist in 18th century Britain. Also, Arthur is a founder member and chairman of the African Heritage Forum.
Kaye Hall is the Education and Community Outreach Officer at the Barbados Museum & Historical Society where she very much enjoys her job of passing on history, heritage and culture to her fellow countrymen of all ages. In this role she fosters partnerships with regional education bodies to ensure the propagation and revitalisation of heritage education, as well as with schools, colleges, communities and individual students to ensure that the inculcation of heritage is a rewarding lifelong learning experience.
She holds a Master of Education (MEd) Social Context and Education Policy from the University of the West Indies (UWI) as well as a professional training certificate in Heritage Culture and Human Resources from the University of Florence. She sits on the executive of local chapter of the International Council of Museums (ICOM Barbados) as its Vice Chairperson and is the Moderator of the Heritage Education and Professional Development Forum for the Caribbean Heritage Network. She also represents the museum community on the Ministry of Education, Technological and Vocational Training’s Syllabus Development Committee which is responsible for curriculum content for the Barbados’ primary and secondary schools.
Dr Laurajan Obermuller is an Amazonianist/Caribbeanist anthropologist of Guyanese descent in the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Laurajan’s research interests and lecturing focuses mainly on gender, natural resource engagements, climate change, Amerindian cosmology, migration, kinship, applied anthropology and indigenous languages preservation in the Caribbean. She strongly advocates and actively participates in collegial collaboration and conversations across anthropological specialisms (sustainable development, history and linguistics). Laurajan has conducted research within the Caribbean region as well as in the United Kingdom. Her current project explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in deprived communities in Jamaica. Her most recent publications on the ‘Windrush Generation Fiasco’ in the Caribbean and the UK are available in Migration and Society and Anthropology Today. In addition to attending and organising numerous international, regional and local conferences and seminars, Laurajan has written several situation analysis and country reports
Dr Shelene Gomes is a Caribbeanist social anthropologist whose research interests include migration, mobilities, cosmopolitanism, feminist praxis as well as postcolonial religion and spirituality. An alumna of St. Andrews, and presently a lecturer at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus in Trinidad and Tobago, Shelene has done ethnographic fieldwork in Ethiopia tracing the linkages between African diasporic imaginings and Caribbean cosmopolitan sensibilities. Through the spiritual repatriation of Rastafari to Ethiopia, her ethnography delineates the power of the imagination to move Caribbean persons as they reinvent themselves. Her current interdisciplinary research centres the experiences of migrant women returning to Trinidad from North America and the UK to undertake socially reproductive labours, in particular unpaid caregiving for aging relatives. Overall, Shelene’s public and scholarly writing is unified by a focus on contemporary solidarities, acts of agency and place-making within the context of unequal historical conditions of modernity.
Dr Alan Miller is a lecturer in Digital Heritage and Communications based at St Andrews. As part of the EU LAC project Alan visited, designed, and delivered workshops on 3D and Spherical media with Catherine Cassidy, Adeola Fabola, Kate Keohane and Karen Brown. Workshops in Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica in 2016 created a cultural heritage digital resources consisting of 3D artefacts, virtual tours and virtual museums and a skills legacy which has been carried forward through Summer intensives, shows and exhibitions. Working with University of West indies and Barbados Museum and Historical Society, we have been developing a Virtual Museum of the Caribbean Migration and Memory, featuring the “Enigma of Arrival” exhibition. Interactive Maps and Exhibition Panels together with Galleries featuring artefacts, lectures, plays and testimony all help tell the experience of migration from a Caribbean Perspective.
Moderator
Dr Huon Wardle is as an anthropologist has focused on cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitics and the Caribbean region. He is Head of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, formerly Director the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies and editor of the Centre’s Yearbook in Cosmopolitan Studies. Research interests: Cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitics, diaspora, comedy, ethics, aesthetics. Area specialities: Jamaica, the Caribbean.
Chair
Prof Catherine O’Leary is a Lecturer in the School of Modern Languages at St Andrews, and Director of CIMS. She is interested in how literature is employed in the present to explore a previously silenced past and also in how literature is used in both identity formation and contestation. Much of her work considers the intersections between culture and the state under the Franco dictatorship in twentieth-century Spain. In addition to several works about political theatre and women’s writing, she was one of the investigators on the AHRC-funded project Theatre Censorship in Spain: 1931-1985 (http://www.dur.ac.uk/mlac/tcs/).