BCRW would like welcome Tami Navarro as our Associate Director. Tami holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Duke University and is also a proud graduate of Wesleyan University (’03). She is currently at work on a manuscript entitled Virgin Capital: Financial Services as Development in the US Virgin Islands, which engages with a local program (the Economic Development Commission, or EDC) to explore the ways that neoliberal initiatives are often built upon existing inequalities, particularly those related to gender and race. This project is based on 16 months of fieldwork Tami conducted in the US Virgin Islands, a time during which she worked closely in the newly-formed banking sector with a number of local women and one billionaire who was later convicted of using the EDC program to run a multi-million dollar fraud.
Before joining BCRW, Tami worked at the Women’s Coalition of St. Croix, a direct-service organization co-founded by Audre Lorde, an experience that solidified her commitment to feminist organizing. Just before coming to Barnard, Tami was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality (IRWGS) at Columbia University where she shared her work on contemporary development policies in the Caribbean in a talk entitled “Easy Money and Respectable Girls: Neoliberalism and Expectation in the US Virgin Islands” as part of IRWGS’s Embodiments of Science series. In this talk, she outlines the features and gendered effects of neoliberal policies in the Anglophone Caribbean.
This past spring, Tami participated in the 2014 Scholar & Feminist Conference, “Locations of Learning: Transnational Feminist Practices,” where she discussed the neoliberalization of the academy. In this talk, she addressed academia’s increasing reliance on adjunct instructors and the ways in which the American system of higher education has become dependent on economic disparity between tenure-track professors and for-hire instructors as well as vulnerability and fear of being displaced from the academy.
As she continues to take the academy as an object of study, Tami will be speaking at the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) conference in November 2014 on panel entitled: “Teaching from a Place of Radical Honesty: A Labor of Love.” The members of this panel are all engaged in various ways with the project of identifying and challenging the disciplinary and academic norms that govern their lives as scholars.
Given the Center’s groundbreaking online journal, The Scholar and Feminist Online, and its always-exciting schedule of events, Tami is excited to begin working with scholars, students, and activists at Barnard and beyond on feminist research and action!
For more information on the effects of flexible hiring in the American academy, check out the following resources:
- “The Discomfort Zone” by Tressie McMillan Cottom in Slate
- Caruth, Gail and Donald Caruth. 2013. Current Issues in Education 16(3): 1-11
- Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2012. “The Crisis of the University in the Context of
Neoapartheid: A View from Ethnic Studies.” Human Architecture: Journal of the
Sociology of Self-Knowledge. 10(1): 91-100 - Navarro, Tami, Bianca Williams, and Attiya Ahmad. 2013. “Sitting at the Kitchen Table: Fieldnotes from Women of Color in Anthropology.” Cultural Anthropology 28(3):443-463
Stay tuned for our 2015 Scholar & Feminist Conference: Action on Education.