This talk is an engagement with the conditions of precarity that characterize the current moment. Navarro links her ethnographic research on offshore banking in the US-owned Virgin Islands to scholarship detailing the troubling neoliberal turn made by the American academy, this lecture is an engagement with neoliberalism and its effects. Building on black feminist scholarship, Navarro will take up the notion of intersectionality and consider its continued salience vis-à-vis contemporary operations of capital. She does this in order to demonstrate the ways in which neoliberal logic builds upon, and deepens, existing hierarchies—divisions that are most often named in relation to class, but are equally significant along lines of gender, race, and color.
Taking seriously the notion that the American academy is in crisis (with institutions relying increasingly on nonsecure, poorly-paid adjunct teaching, offering ever-fewer tenure track positions for the steady stream of newly-minted Ph.D’s that are produced each year), Navarro will examine the effects of this precarity on teaching, faculty/staff research agendas, and student advising. She will pay particular attention to the ways female faculty members and scholars of color are positioned in this financial-academic environment. Linking these concerns to her own research agenda on economic development in the US Virgin Islands, her work provides a gendered analysis of the neoliberal project, as she examines the Economic Development Commission (EDC) initiative, a tax holiday program that has attracted a number of primarily American bankers to the island of St. Croix. In this talk, Navarro will explore the issue of gender vis-à-vis the EDC program, as she works through the gendered expectations governing the local women working in the EDC sector, a group known locally as ‘EDC girls.’ These workers, a group of local women who have contributed to the creation of a new social category on St. Croix, are expected to dress, act, and dispose of their generous salaries both conspicuously and in ways that benefit the broader community of St. Croix. Navarro argues that far from serving as unwitting participants in these processes, these women perform a mediating role in neoliberal globalization, actively participating in the creating of new social and economic realities.