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Dr Tracie Rogers is a Caribbean feminist scholar and artist whose work moves across and between sites of knowledge production, creative inquiry, and community engagement. She is a faculty member in the Department of Sociology, Psychology, and Social Work at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica, and a Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Her scholarship is grounded in decolonial and arts-based methodologies, with particular attention to how knowledge is made, carried, and refused, especially within and from the Caribbean.
Drawing on visual portraiture, narrative inquiry, and mixed media practice, she explores memory, identity, and the lived experiences of the marginalised, examined on their own epistemic terms, insisting on the validity of embodied, relational, and creative ways of knowing. This commitment extends across her research and pedagogy, where she works alongside communities whose knowledge has been overlooked, creating spaces for voice, reflection, and collective inquiry.
Dr Rogers is also the host of Saltwater Reasonings, a public scholarship podcast conceived as a listening library for critical dialogue, reflection, and collective knowing. She is Editor of the Caribbean Journal of Social Work and Co-chair of the forthcoming Caribbean Research Methodologies Conference (CRM 2027). She teaches, creates, and works from a conviction that the Caribbean is a critical site of knowledge production.
COMPLEXITY IS THE METHOD: IN BASS RIDDIM
Marcia Douglas structures The Marvellous Equations of the Dread in bass riddim: knowledge rising from the bottom, pulsing, recurring, accumulating through return. Kamau Brathwaite names a related epistemic movement in tidalectics: a mode of knowing that does not proceed through linear progression but returns, reworks, and reveals. Read together, these are not literary innovations. They are methodological propositions. This keynote argues that what dominant research traditions train us to recognise as complication, excess, contradiction, relational density, is the site at which knowledge is produced. Caribbean complexity is not a problem for method. It is method. Structured in bass riddim, the keynote moves in three waves, each returning to a central question and finding it transformed through the act of return. In doing so, it refuses the demand for linearity, coherence, and resolution as preconditions for knowledge. This talk is a methodological intervention grounded in Caribbean ways of knowing.