Exploring Domestic Violence Social Support Work in Postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago: Old Talk, New Conversations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Domestic violence social support work is often simplistically conceptualized as ‘help’. In this thesis, I query this narrative of help through a critical examination of domestic violence social support praxis in the neoliberal, postcolonial, multiracial context of Trinidad and Tobago. I contend that (re)reading the historical legacy of social support work as a site of regulation in the Caribbean is a significant component of this critique as these support interventions are deeply implicated in attempts to manage the social body during the post-emancipation, post-indentureship era. By both historicizing and attending to the current neoliberal context of this support work, I explore its contradictory character by illustrating the ways in which workers engage with hegemonic scripts of gender, race, class, sexuality and family. I track the ways that workers reproduce, interrupt and adapt these scripts, specifically in relation to the logics of governance reminiscent of the colonial period and in response to the contemporary neoliberal moment in the Caribbean. In this qualitative study, I offer an analysis of semi-structured interviews with twenty-six domestic violence social support workers. I specifically explore how they narrate their praxis and the ways that they conceptualize domestic violence and the subjects who are embroiled within it. Analyzing instantiations of hegemonic understandings of difference in these narratives, I argue that many workers conceptualize domestic violence in ways that individualize and de-gender it, while producing women’s survival in ways that are inflected by understandings of ‘the neoliberal subject’. What also comes to the fore is how notions of domestic violence are racialized in ways that are deeply linked with historically rooted discourses of race, violence and family. In spite of this link and the overtly racialized social environment, workers disclose deep investments in disavowing the significance of race in their praxis. I situate and explore these findings within the convergence of the colonial and disciplinary legacy of social support work in the region; the growing prominence of neoliberal discourses; and the continuities of colonial constructions of race, gender, class, sexuality and family.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".