Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown

Debt, Development, and Defiance: An Anti-Colonial Feminist Gathering

Climate Change, Decolonization and Global Blackness (CCDGB) Workshop | University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados | May 2–3, 2026

Debt, Development, and Defiance: An Anti-Colonial Feminist Gathering

Climate Change, Decolonization and Global Blackness (CCDGB) Workshop | University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados | May 2–3, 2026

May 2026 marks the third year of the Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness Workshop hosted by the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown (CEHAB) in collaboration with Duke University and New York University. After its inaugural year at Duke in 2024, and 2025 iteration as "In the Dissolution" at Brown, this year the workshop will take place at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados.

In this year’s workshop, we attend to the deadly economic triad, trade + finance + extractivism, that has prevailed from the apex of Western imperialism to 20th and 21st century projects of development. In particular, we are interested in mapping the critical tools and methods of an anticolonial feminist analysis addressing the economic, social, and ecological devastation the triad causes, considering the many past and present forms of dissent to the colonial contours of the global economy by political and corporate elites, and the antidotes proposed by radical and progressive movements and other forces of opposition.

As the 2024 workshop at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University sought to establish the conversation as to the convergence of climate change, decolonization and global blackness as critical interlocutors in planetary inhabitance, the 2025 iteration at the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown (CEHAB) considered the valences of such work 'in the dissolution' through decolonial, queer and trans* creative, and transversal approaches to knowledge production towards the fracturing of the liberal humanist imaginary, racial capital, and toxic modernity.

The upcoming 2026 workshop brings together political economists, critical legal theorists, historians, philosophers and media, technology, and cultural studies scholars. More specifically, we are inviting this multidisciplinary group of scholars to consider an approach to debt and development as primary mechanisms through which the colonial practices of expropriation and extraction have been maintained, in the post-independence era, as well as of the principle of reparability, as tools in the anti-colonial discursive toolbox. Taking place in Barbados, and foregrounding the long trajectory of the deadly triad, our workshop participants will speak to both the contributions and limitations of Marxian-oriented 20th-century critiques of capital (dependency theory, world-system theory, uneven development) and contemporary lines of critique (including autonomist Marxist, regulation theory and various strains of heterodox economics emerging from the Global South) to the analysis of the global capitalist present.

Format

The workshop will be held in Bridgetown, Barbados, the eastern most island of the Caribbean, where Prime Minister Mia Mottley has launched “The Bridgetown Initiative,” a major challenge to debt, poverty and climate catastrophe future. We hope that our gathering with artists, makers, thinkers, scholars and activists will contribute to the case against the prevailing view that development can proceed without attending to the ecological consequences of centuries of capitalist extraction and expropriation of lands and labor.

Participants in the workshop will speak both to the violent historical legacy of debt broadly constructed and contested, and to the issue of the current sovereign debt crisis. The latter has resulted from the asymmetrical global financial systems that place the GDP/GNP of much of the Global South, in countries from Argentina to Pakistan and Mozambique, in debt-subordinate positions.

The workshop will take place at The University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, beginning on May 2 with Brown participants arriving no later than May 1 to be in-residence in Barbados through May 4. Brown University doctoral students will receive financial support for travel and accommodations from the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown (CEHAB) at the Cogut Institute.

Application

Applications are best received by March 11, 2026. Brown doctoral students should submit a letter of interest (maximum 2 pages, double spaced) and an abbreviated CV of two pages maximum. Each student must submit an individual application. Spaces are highly limited, so timely submission of materials is encouraged.

Please include the following information in the letter of interest:

A brief statement of purpose including an outline of how your research engages with and contributes to the workshop’s themes of inquiry.
A brief abstract of a relevant project that you might present during the workshop for feedback and development.

Apply

Enquiries concerning the workshop or application process should be directed to the workshop’s Graduate Coordinator, Isaac Essex at environmental-humanities@brown.edu.