Keston Perry

Biography

Keston K. Perry, PhD. is a political economist and interdisciplinary scholar whose work examines how race, capitalism, colonialism, finance, and environmental change shape the material conditions of life—and how communities build collective power and infrastructures to transform them. A scholar of the Caribbean and African diaspora, he works across Black Studies, political economy, geography, economic history, and environmental humanities.

Rather than treating colonialism and the plantation as historical systems, Perry examines how their underlying structures continually reorganized within contemporary political and economic life—and how communities contest and transform them. His work centers Caribbean communities not as passive victims of crisis or dispossession, but as producers of knowledge, infrastructures, and alternative systems of life. His first book project, Island Rebels on the Edge: Black Repair, Indigenous Survival, and the Caribbean’s Struggle Against Ecological Imperialism, examines struggles against extraction and ecological dispossession through practices of repair, sovereignty, and collective survival.

His emerging work moves from diagnosing these structures toward building alternative systems of life and reparative infrastructures. Through projects including Unmaking Paradise: Race and a Different Caribbean and the Community Coastal Knowledge Commons, he explores how communities can govern knowledge, defend territory, document dispossession, strengthen collective institutions, and build alternatives to extractive systems.

His emerging creative work extends these questions into more intimate and public forms. Cupecoy Shores is a Black queer meditation on Caribbean place, memory, desire, and freedom, while Our Beach is a book-length study of Black queer placemaking, spatial politics, kinship, and belonging. Unmaking Paradise brings these concerns into a crossover project that challenges dominant narratives of the Caribbean through race, political economy, colonialism, and struggles over collective life.

This work builds on a growing practice of community-engaged research and cultural production. Through projects including Grounding Reparations and the REPAIR Lab, Perry has developed participatory research, community conversations, and public-facing forms of knowledge production. His current work extends these relationships across the Caribbean, including Barbuda, Dominica, Haiti, Tobago, and Sint Maarten/Saint Martin.

Perry’s scholarship has appeared in Geoforum, Politics, Climate and Development, The Geographical Journal, and Development and Change, among other venues. His public-facing work includes being a consultant for the Guardian’s Cotton Capital series, and his international policy experience includes work with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). He has previously taught at Williams College and the University of the West of England and conducted research at Tufts University’s Climate Policy Lab.

This trajectory is now extending into CARIBECommons, an emerging platform for community-governed research, cultural production, and collective action across the Caribbean and its diasporas. It begins from the conviction that communities are not subjects of research or passive recipients of policy, but makers of knowledge, relationships, infrastructures, and worlds. Its work would connect research, cultural production, organizing, archives, digital tools, and public intervention in ways that cultivate collective power, sustain memory and belonging, and create the conditions for communities to co-create and build more livable futures on their own terms.

For Perry, repair is not merely an intellectual interest. It is a praxis of cultivating the relationships, practices, and infrastructures through which people collectively sustain life, defend territory, govern knowledge and resources, and make the worlds otherwise.