Dr Doreen Gordon from SPSW has over 10 years of local and international experience, with research strengths in analysis of socio-cultural change, social inequality, and development and social justice issues. She has carried out research in Brazil, South Africa, and Jamaica, writing about issues of race, class, inequality, religion, aesthetics, and health across the African diaspora. More recently, she has been involved in the in the “Household Food Security and Public Health in Caricom Countries” project, led by Dr Alafia Samuels of the George Alleyne Chronic Disease Research Center in Barbados as the Principal Investigator.

Dr Michael Barnett from SPSW is a Rastafari writer, who have published or edited numerous books such as Rastafari in the New Millennium, Leonard Percival Howell & the Genesis of Rastafari, The Rastafari Movement: A North American and Caribbean Perspective. Dr Barnett is also interested in Black Social movements and Black Liberation theology movements and has published numerous articles in the Caribbean Quarterly, Journal of Caribbean Studies and the Journal of Black Studies. For example, Differences and Similarities Between the Rastafari Move ment and the Nation of Islam and Rastafari Dialectism: The Epistemological Individualism and Conectivism of Rastafari.

Dr Tracy McFarlane’s research interests are social identity, immigrant adjustment, and stigma. She has conducted research in areas such as race and ethnicity in Jamaica, category labels versus personal self-descriptions of identity, discrimination and tradition among Caribbean-born women in us colleges, as well as homophobia, racism, and sexism.