Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Dr. Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan is an Indo-Trinidadian queer scholar, activist, educator, and artist. Her research and writing have documented Indo-Trinidadian cultural forms, like pachraat folk songs; critiqued cultural practices like ritual purity, specifically the religious purdah of menstruating women; and detailed the identity politics, personal resilience, and collective space making practices of Trinidadian same-sex loving women.

In her monograph Erotic Cartographies: Decolonization and the Queer Caribbean Imagination (Jan 2022), she highlights the ways in which same-sex loving women embody their sexual identities to challenge normative (colonial) notions of Caribbean femininity, space, culture, and family as defined through colonial discourse and enactments of power. Erotic Cartographies refers to the processes of mapping territories of self-knowing and self-expression, both cognitively in the imagination and on paper during a subjective mapping exercise, exploring how meaning is given to space, and how it is transformed.

Dr. Ghisyawan graduated Summa Cum Laude from York University (Canada) with a Double Honours B.A. in Anthropology and South Asian Studies. She then pursued an MPhil/Ph.D. in Sociology at UWI, St Augustine, graduating with distinction in 2016. She went on to Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies in 2016-2017, as a postdoctoral associate.

Dr. Ghisyawan has been involved with the Silver Lining Foundation (SLF) in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), and is currently their Director of Research. The group's pioneering nationwide school climate study gathered data on bullying in secondary schools across T&T, established the need for comprehensive sex and sexuality education, and restorative justice practices that would interrupt students' urge to engage in violence, without disrupting their opportunities to learn. The report on their second such study is now publicly available on the Foundation’s website. Dr. Ghisyawan is the primary author of the survey reports, as well as the guides and manuals for SLF’s Teacher Training program, focusing on conflict resolution and managing diverse classrooms.  

Dr. Ghisyawan currently runs a successful consultancy as a developmental and content editor, based in Lawrenceville GA.  

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