DELANEY, KELSI
Independent researcher @ Independent
Bio
Dr Kelsi Delaney is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Teaching Fellow at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research areas are Caribbean literature and poetry. She is currently working on the collaborative research project, Representing Gender- Based Violence: Literature, Performance and Activism in the Anglophone Caribbean, funded by the AHRC. On this project, Dr Delaney examines representations of GBV in poetry, drama, print and spoken word. Her recently completed UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Midlands3Cities funded PhD explored the cultural politics of form in contemporary anglophone Caribbean poetry. Dr Delaney is a founding member of the research network, New Voices in Postcolonial Studies. She co-edited Caribbean Journeys (University of Leicester Centre for New Writing, 2018), a collection of biographical travel narratives by Nottingham-based Caribbean elders. The book was the culmination of a community engagement project she led with the Caribbean National Heritage Museum and the charity Journey for Justice. Dr Delaney is currently guest editing a pamphlet featuring the work of an emerging Caribbean poet for New Walk Editions (forthcoming 2023). Her magazine article, ‘Sonnets of the Caribbean’ is forthcoming in 2022 with the English Review, and she has an article under review at the Journal of West Indian Literature.
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- Summary: This paper examines the perceptions, experiences and opinions of young people from Trinidad and Tobago participating in a workshop series as part of the collaborative research project ‘Representing Gender-Based Violence: Literature, Performance and Activism in the Anglophone Caribbean’. Delivered in conjunction by the University of Leicester, the University of the West Indies and the community organisation, ROOTS Foundation, the workshop series set out to facilitate young people to explore and address the topic of GBV through spoken word poetry. Drawing on the experiences and voices of the youth participants, the project aims to produce a spoken word, theatre-based facilitation model for peer-education on issues of GBV in the lives of young people. This paper outlines the workshop model used and offers an examination of the themes pertaining to GBV that emerged in both the spoken word poetry produced by the youth participants and in the discussions between facilitators and participants that occurred during the workshops. The paper considers how the prominent themes that emerged in the workshops can be related both to wider scholarship on GBV in the Caribbean region and to representations of GBV in literary and performance cultures. Crucially, the paper foregrounds the unique perspectives young people contribute to the topic of GBV, and exemplifies how their voices can be amplified as they are facilitated to take leadership in arts activism addressing GBV.