Dr Biholar’s interdisciplinary research and publications intersect primarily in the areas of international human rights law, gender studies and reparatory justice.

She locates her research within the Caribbean and her writing is particularly concerned with the implementation of international human rights treaties, transformative equality, gender-based violence, and the operationalization of gender stereotyping through law, policy and social practices. Her 2013 book, Transforming Discriminatory Sex Roles and Gender Stereotyping (Intersentia), addresses a central concern for the work of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW Committee)– the implementation deficit of women’s rights, and expands on the concept of transformative equality. Based on socio-legal research, Dr. Biholar advances a synergistic model, which indicates the multiples women’s rights implementing actors, actions and strategies, and the organic, integrated interplay between and among them that are instrumental in the national implementation of CEDAW’s provisions. She also clarifies CEDAW state obligations for social and cultural transformation, while indicating ways to challenge the relationship between gender stereotyping and gender-based violence against women. Dr. Biholar has also been concerned with the usefulness of national gender policy documents for promoting gender equality in the Caribbean. In Masculinities and the Practice of Dominica’s National Gender Policy, published in G. J. Hosein and J. Parpart (eds., Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016) she undertakes ethnographic research to explore the ways in which the national gender policy of the Commonwealth of Dominica engages with discourses on masculinities, and on boys and men, and how this shapes the practice of implementing the national gender policy. She sheds light on the Caribbean state’s resilient masculinist resistances to the implementation of the gender policy as an important state instrument.

The recent book Critical Caribbean Perspectives on Preventing Gender-Based Violence (Routledge, 2022) which Dr. Biholar co-edited with Dr. Dacia Leslie, is concerned with the ways in which gender-based violence victimisation and perpetration have been socially and institutionally shaped, and supported by fixed gender codes. The editors bring together a multidisciplinary team of Caribbean researchers and practitioners to explain the reasons for the perpetuation of gender-based violence in the Anglophone Caribbean and to propose viable policy and programming solutions to prevent it. Biholar’s contribution, in particular, discusses the operationalization of gender stereotyping in Anglophone Caribbean sexual offences laws and sheds light on the ways in which these laws  legitimise the normalisation of sexual violence. In 2022, the book was featured in the UWI Mona Library Celebration of Books.

Dr. Biholar‘s scholarship also focuses on the conceptualization of the human right to development (RTD) at global and regional levels. She is particularly concerned with RTD as an empowerment tool demanding accountability in the journal article The Right to Development: ‘the Alpha and Omega of Rights’ (Journal of Law, Governance and Society, 2020), as well as in Imagining Caribbean Development: The Right to Development and the Reparations Nexus published in C.C. Ngang, S.D. Kamga and V. Gumede (eds., Pretoria University Law Press ,2018) where she also draws the connection between RTD and regional calls for reparations. Biholar furthers her scholarship on reparatory justice in the journal article Reparations for Chattel Slavery: A Call From the ‘Periphery’ to Decolonise International (Human Rights) Law (Nordic Journal of Human Rights, 2022), where she draws on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) to bring attention to the coloniality of international legal systems and their inability to respond to Caribbean reparations calls.

Dr. Biholar received the UWI Principal’s Research Award for the Best Research Publication (Article) (2015) and the UWI Principal’s Research Award for Most Outstanding Researcher (2023).