Panelist Bios:
Dr. Angelique V. Nixon is a Bahamas-born, Trinidad-based writer, artist, and scholar-activist. She is a Lecturer at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at The UWI St. Augustine. Her research and teaching areas include Caribbean and postcolonial studies, African diaspora literatures, gender and sexuality studies, tourism and diaspora studies, and transnational migrations. Dr. Nixon holds a Ph.D. in English and Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies and Gender Research from the University of Florida, where she specialised in Caribbean and African diaspora literatures and postcolonial, feminist and gender studies. Her current research investigates Caribbean freedom, social movements and decolonial poetics at the crossroads of climate and migration crisis and unsustainable development. Angelique has been active in Caribbean movements for social and environmental justice for over a decade, and is committed to intersectional queer feminist praxis, decolonial politics and Black liberation. Currently, she is director of the feminist LGBTI civil society organisation CAISO: Sex and Gender Justice, Trinidad & Tobago.
Kelli Armstrong is a graduate student in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences. Kelli was recently named a 2021 Climate Ambassador of the Global Youth Climate Network (GYCN). During her program, she is dedicating time to local climate action; raising awareness about climate change impacts locally and reducing our carbon footprint. In addition to spending quality time with her family, which includes her two-year-old son,
Jhannel Tomlinson is a Ph.D. Candidate and researcher with a background in agriculture, rural livelihoods and community-based adaptation to climate change who is passionate about activism and youth engagement in issues related to climate change.
Marsha Allen is a PhD candidate in hydrogeology at UMass studying how the groundwater system of Tobago works and trying to project how it will respond to climate change.