Research Philosophy
Situated, Transparent, and Ethically Accountable Research
I approach research as a situated, culturally responsive, and ethically accountable practice. My work centres trauma, memory, and meaning-making in Caribbean contexts, particularly among women and helping professionals. I operate from the position that the identities, histories, and institutional locations of the researcher shape all research. Acknowledging this does not diminish rigour; rather, it enhances it.
In my framework, rigour is defined by ethical clarity, methodological precision, and reflexive transparency. Whilst objectivity and replicability remain important in some qualitative traditions, they are not always appropriate for inquiries into embodied memory, ancestral knowledge, or sociogenic trauma. These forms of knowledge cannot always be observed, measured, or repeated in conventional ways. Therefore, I seek to expand what counts as valid knowledge whilst maintaining transparency and coherence in my methods.
Intellectual Commitments and Theoretical Influence
My research is shaped by the liberatory thought of Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, and Patricia Hill Collins. Rodney's insistence that scholars must serve the people, not the system, grounds my approach to publicly engaged, socially relevant scholarship. Fanon's concept of sociogenic trauma helps me analyse how colonial violence is internalised and reproduced through institutional forms, particularly in mental health and education.
Patricia Hill Collins's standpoint epistemology informs how I structure the research process. I treat positionality not as a preliminary reflexive gesture but as an ongoing analytic tool. My identity as a Black Caribbean woman, therapist, and educator informs how I interpret data and structure my methodology. Unlike universalist feminist approaches that may treat gender as a primary analytical category, my work attends to how multiple systems of power (race, coloniality, gender, and class) shape who gets to speak, be heard, and be believed.
I also draw on Cynthia Dillard's concept of (re)membering, which frames research as a practice of spiritual and epistemological return. In my work, (re)membering authorises the use of ritual, ancestral dialogue, and body-based reflection as legitimate research acts. It provides an ethical foundation for work that engages trauma not as content alone, but as a historical, intergenerational, and affective force.
Methodologies: Arts-Based, Visual, and Embodied Inquiry
My methodological approach brings together arts-based inquiry, trauma-informed practice, and decolonial qualitative research. I do not treat these as aesthetic enhancements to conventional data collection, but as essential strategies for generating insight in contexts where pain, resistance, or memory may not be fully accessible through spoken narrative.
I use visual autoethnography, poetic inquiry, and found text montage as interlinked strategies. These are not interchangeable tools, but methods chosen for their ability to surface knowledge that is often silenced in institutional discourse. Poetic inquiry allows me to work with the affective register of participant speech. It is particularly effective when trauma narratives are fragmented or emotionally charged. Through the compression and reassembly of language, it reveals contradictions, silences, and affective intensities that may be lost in verbatim transcription. Found text montage enables institutional critique by layering personal reflection with policy documents, assessment reports, and archival material. In the context of Caribbean social work, this method helps visualise the dissonance between stated institutional aims and lived experience on the ground.
My approach is also grounded in Caribbean epistemologies. I incorporate Camille Nakhid's advocacy for ole talk and liming as data collection methods, using informal conversation as both a culturally familiar and methodologically valid way to build trust, generate insight, and co-analyse experience. These dialogic spaces allow for fluid, layered expressions of knowledge that resist extractive research relationships and hierarchical knowledge structures.
Saltwater Reasonings and Dialogic Knowledge
Saltwater Reasonings is a digital listening library I developed as part of my commitment to dialogic and accessible research dissemination. The project is grounded in the Caribbean tradition of reasoning: a communal, often intergenerational practice of reflection and dissent.
In a region with deep oral traditions and high levels of digital media engagement, audio formats are not simply convenient but culturally appropriate. Voice, cadence, silence, and repetition are epistemological forms in Caribbean communities. They convey authority, emotion, and relational context that are often stripped out in textual abstraction.
Saltwater Reasonings includes podcasts, audio essays, and recorded conversations on trauma, care, institutional critique, and research justice. These recordings are not just dissemination tools; they are also research artefacts. I use them to trace how meaning circulates in dialogue, how vulnerability is shared, and how knowledge is co-created in real time.
Mek Wi Talk: Critical Conversations is a student-led podcast series that centres on social work students' experiences in navigating practice, politics, and care. The episodes document stories of fieldwork, uncertainty, resistance, and growth. These dialogues offer insight into pedagogical tensions and institutional shortcomings whilst modelling trauma-responsive, relational learning.
Critical Reflections and Methodological Tensions
I am aware that arts-based and autoethnographic research faces significant critique within academic institutions. Questions around validity, generalisability, and the risk of self-indulgence are legitimate concerns. I address these by maintaining analytic transparency and engaging peer review and participant feedback.
I also recognise the difficulty of translating emotionally charged, visual, or spiritual knowledge into institutional formats such as reports or policy briefs. I am currently developing visual summaries, audio ethnographies, and multimodal toolkits to bridge this gap while maintaining the integrity of the original insights.
Finally, I acknowledge this work's resource demands and emotional labour, particularly when researching trauma..
Contributions and Commitments
My research contributes to the ongoing effort to make Caribbean social work and qualitative inquiry more responsive to cultural context, structural harm, and lived experience. Specifically, I have developed:
A trauma-informed visual methodology for examining institutional and pedagogical harm
Arts-based methods that uncover affective and embodied knowledge, often obscured by conventional approaches
Platforms like Saltwater Reasonings and Mek Wi Talk that model community-engaged, multimodal research dissemination
These contributions are grounded in existing traditions of Caribbean resistance, spiritual inquiry, and communal knowledge-making. My goal is not to redefine the field, but to offer generative tools, questions, and models that honour the complexity of Caribbean lives and epistemologies.