Moving from Behind God is a Social Anthropology doctoral project based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork across several communities in St. Thomas, Jamaica (2024-2025). This research explores the various contradictions and tensions surrounding and embedded within several state-led development projects in St. Thomas as the region continues to be reimagined in national discourse as the “new frontier” of modern infrastructural transformation.

I aim to understand how concepts of progress and development are continuously being negotiated among residents, NGOs and political representatives, and how such negotiations are complicated by structures of informal political control, political violence and the existence of high-risk informal economies. In other words, what becomes revealed when we decide to critically study the darker, less picturesque side of development? What does such an endeavour reveal about the current and future state of democratic governance in St. Thomas and Jamaican society at large? How do St. Thomas residents make sense of (and make life in the face of) various forms of political dysfunction?

Throughout my work, I use photographs and videos to mark various spaces and encounters as returning points to think through key themes and the various ways they take hold across different communities in the St. Thomas region.