An act of gender-based violence she witnessed among her peers as an undergraduate student moved Dr Sue-Ann Barratt to try to understand why young people were behaving in a way she thought was more common among elders.
“It really struck me, in some way it disturbed me because I did not expect young people, like myself to really subscribe to some of the beliefs that I saw older heads in the neighbourhood engaged in.
“Yes, there was gender-based violence but you would think that younger people would step away from it. That was my naive view at the time. When I saw it, I wanted to understand what are the perceptions that would lead someone to conflict,” she told WMN.
Barratt, the new head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS) at the University of the West Indies (UWI) St Augustine, said the incident brought about a curiosity that led her to her current vocation.
She is no stranger to the university, having joined the IGDS in 2014 as an assistant lecturer, instructor III and most recently lecturer and graduate coordinator. Barratt has also held positions on UWI’s campus ethics committee as a research committee member for communication studies, a faculty board member of the faculty of humanities and education, a member of the gender advisory board, and has reviewed several university courses.
[caption id="attachment_910043" align="alignnone" width="778"] Transgender women Brandy Rodriguez and Xoe Stanley of the Trinidad and Tobago Transgender Coalition hold a placard during PrideTT’s launch of Pride month 2020 opposite the Red House, Abercromby Street, Port of Spain. - Photo by Jeff Mayers[/caption]
She also worked in academia at departments across UWI St Augustine and Mona, Jamaica campuses, the Caribbean School of Media and Communication (Carimac), and in media at the Trinidad and Tobago Broadcasting Network. She started her professional career as a broadcast journalist but found her passion for understanding human communication and interaction.
Barratt, a graduate of UWI, holds a PhD in interdisciplinary gender studies, a master's degree in communication studies and a bachelor's degree in media and communication studies with political science. She was appointed on August 1, and will serve a three-year term, having replaced Dr Gabrielle Hosein.
Her specialisations include communication conflict and gender-based violence, interpersonal interaction, mass media and computer mediated communication, social media and user generated content, gender and ethnic identities, person perception, feminist studies and Carnival studies.
Barratt explained while gender-based violence was not new in TT, it was something that needed to be addressed with greater detail and urgency than what was being done now.
“We have to confront the cultural norms, attitudes, belief systems and ideologies that remain unquestioned and the things that we take for granted in casual conversation.” She explained that the conversation needed to move away from victim blaming to accounting for the act of violence, the m
