Flair | House is the place the center is for Anna Perkins | Life-style

Being a part of a feminine collective marking a history-making flip at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona campus, just isn’t misplaced on Anna Kasafi Perkins.

Appointed final 12 months as a professor of Caribbean theology and ethics within the Faculty of Humanities and Education, a delighted and forthcoming Perkins doesn’t shirk away from the elephant within the room.

“To recognise we have made an increasing space for women and the work they have done, where ordinarily in the past, when professorships were being handed out, it mostly would have been men, is progressive,” she informed Flair in a sit-down within the convention room within the school’s predominant workplace.

“UWI is certainly moving in a direction where they are valuing and validating the work of women academics and women researchers.”

Perkins, who can also be the senior programme officer within the Quality Assurance Unit at UWI’s Regional Headquarters, is considered one of 4 colleagues within the school who’ve not too long ago been elevated to professorship.

The different three ladies are Zoyah Kinkead-Clark, deputy dean of graduate research; Carmel Roofe, director of the School of Education and professor of curriculum research; and Sonjah Stanley Niaah, professor of cultural research within the school and director of the Centre for Reparation Research at UWI’s Regional Headquarters.

As she took inventory of her academic roadmap — from a primary diploma at St Michael’s Theological College right here, to a Master of Philosophy in Christian theology within the trendy world on the University of Cambridge in England, to Boston College for a Doctorate of Philosophy in theological ethics — Perkins famous that nationalism and paying it ahead have been twinned priorities that at all times beckoned a return to house.

“That was always part of the calling, to come back to Jamaica. Get what I needed to have done away, but I felt there was always something I had to do here,” mentioned the now 56-year-old.

While initially accepted at UWI in 1987 to learn for an undergraduate diploma in geography, the Immaculate Conception High alumna had a sustained curiosity in theology, which led her to detour to attend St Michael’s.

Though she had lengthy labored throughout the street on the college’s affiliated multidimensional ecumenical seminary, Perkins’ journey at UWI formally started in 2007.

Work was threefold, straddling administrative duties, educating high quality assurance and ethics, and conducting analysis. Other strands of the educational’s work look at gender minorities and poverty. “Justice links all of that together, and how do you give regard to our culture and what popular culture means, which is not high culture, so you want to look down your nose at folk culture. You find that I am highly interested in dancehall because it rubs up against a lot of these issues that I am concerned about,” mentioned Perkins, a significant fan of the music catalogue of Jamaican deejay and singer Tanya Stephens.

She lauds the inventive as hard-hitting, humorous and completely proficient “in how she draws on her No 2 pencil to write and give expression.”

A testomony of her adoration noticed the theologian co-editing the 2020-published Rough Riding: Tanya Stephens and The Power of Music to Transform Society — a set of articles analyzing completely different aspects of Stephens, alongside Adwoa Ntozake Onuora and Ajamu Nangwaya.

While she does in depth analysis to pen books or chapters in them herself (there have been greater than 50 ultimately depend), in her downtime, Perkins is an avid bibliophile together with her pursuits spanning Canadian journalist and writer Malcolm Gladwell to Trinidadian poet and fiction author Jennifer Rahim.

“I love to watch movies, I love drama,” she divulged, mentioning that a lot of her leisure time, which incorporates restaurant crawls to new spots throughout the capital metropolis, is shared together with her accomplice of 14 years, engineer Patrick Dallas.

“That’s part of what makes our friendship stronger,” she reasoned. “Patrick is not religious, and people give him a hard time about that.”

So, how do their opposing takes on faith influence their union?

“It works beautifully because Patrick has a lot of respect for religion, and we have lots of discussions about it. He recognises that I have a critical perspective on the subject,” she defined.

Having grown up in Hope Tavern, the center little one of 5 for her mason father Herman Perkins and officer custodian spouse Sarah, the professor has made deliberate life actions to choose out of motherhood and never tie the knot. She is completely high-quality together with her selections.

“I think I will be honest that it is a pushback. I don’t need to validate myself with a ‘Mrs’, I don’t need to. That solidifies nothing. What Patrick and I have is really strong, so I am not there yet. It is totally inconsequential to me and to him.”

There is fulfilment in being an aunt to her eight-year-old nephew and three-year-old niece.

“We share a dual home; they live on one side with my brother and his wife, and I am on the next. They are the joy of my life. The joy comes from watching them grow and recognising [that] I am shaping them.”

Forging forward together with her professorial appointment, she mentioned, “I want to continue to mentor students and do that by supervising master’s and PhD students. I want to contribute to growing a cadre of really good academics at that level. I got here by a process, and that process doesn’t end because a title has been awarded,” shared the lady adoringly nicknamed ‘Our Professor Perkins’ (OPP) by colleagues in her unit.

way of life@gleanerjm.com