Bio
Dr. Tonya Haynes is the first graduate of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies: Nita Barrow Unit’s PhD programme, proudly representing a new generation of homegrown Caribbean feminist scholars. Animated by the liberatory potential of Caribbean feminisms, Dr. Tonya Haynes has published essays on Caribbean feminisms and feminist thought in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, sx:archipelagos, Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies and Love and Power: Caribbean Discourses on Gender (edited by Eudine Barriteau). Her research on gender-based violence is published in Global Public Health and Social and Economic Studies. She is co-editor (with Dr. Tami Navarro) of the Special Issue of the Scholar and Feminist Online entitled “Caribbean Feminisms: Interventions in Scholarship, Art, and Activism across the Region”. Her recent publication “Contradictory Consciousness: Activist Men and Caribbean Feminism” appears in Unsustainable Institutions of Men: Gender Power and the Contradictions of Transnational Dispersed Centres (edited by Jeff Hearn, Ernesto Vasquez del Aguila, and Marina Hughson). In 2011 she was a Visiting Scholar in the GEXcel programme at Linkopings Universitet, Sweden.
A passionate educator, Dr. Haynes is a 2018 recipient of the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning/Guild of Students Recognition Award for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning.
On behalf of the IGDS: NBU Dr. Haynes lead Caribbean Partnerships, an interface between governments, civil society and academia toward progressive economic and social policy making, with global partner Regions Refocus and technical support of the Caribbean Development Bank. She also leads the EU-funded LIVITY Project in collaboration with the Barbados Council for the Disabled and the Eastern Caribbean Alliance for Diversity and Equality. A sought-after speaker and workshop facilitator, she was a closing plenary speaker at the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) forum in Brazil in 2016, delivered a Strategic Gender Training workshop in Dominica in 2017 in the context of post Tropical Storm Erica recovery and delivered the keynote address at the Caribbean Cyberfeminisms conference in Trinidad and Tobago in 2019. She has delivered invited public lectures at Virginia Tech and Connecticut College.
Since co-convening the CatchAFyah Young Feminist Grounding in 2012, Dr. Haynes has been most passionate about learning from and collaborating with queer and feminist organizers in the region and the Global South.