Merisa’s current work has three broad, but interlinked strands: firstly, understanding intersections of gender, race, class and nation, and how gendered food-producing identities, in the Caribbean and beyond, navigate and are reproduced by the political economy; secondly, exploring questions of politics and power between states, capital and food producers in the global food system, and relations between human and nonhuman actors, with a particular focus on the dairy sector; and, thirdly, envisioning ways of generating greater justice in global, regional, national and local food systems as a whole. She has conducted fieldwork in the Caribbean, New Zealand and across the UK. Merisa draws on a range of qualitative methods to underpin this work: historical archival research, interviews, ethnography and visual analysis.
Research interests:
- gender, politics and power
- feminist international political economy
- food, agriculture and the environment
- human and nonhuman actors
- feminist epistemologies and methodologies
Current and Recent Projects
Principal Investigator, British Academy/Leverhulme Trust, Intersections of Gender, Race and Class: The Impact of Colonial Legacies on Contemporary Food and Agricultural Policy in the Caribbean, 2022-2024.
Research Fellow, N8 Agrifood/HEFCE, Global Food Justice, 2016-2019.