Dr Merisa Thompson

• PhD in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, The University of the West Indies 
• MA in Social Research, University of Sheffield
• BA Sociology, University of Sheffield

Merisa joined the IDD in November 2019 as Lecturer in Gender and Development. She was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield where her research focused on issues related to global food justice.

Prior to that she undertook her PhD in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS) at The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, where she was also a Graduate Tutor. Her PhD was a historical and contemporary gendered analysis of relations between food producers, the state and capital in the post-colonial nation of Trinidad. Merisa has also worked on a range of research projects (including monitoring and evaluation) with NGOs in both the UK and Caribbean.

MA Gender and Development

UG Global Development Challenges

Merisa’s current work has three broad, but interlinked strands: firstly, understanding intersections of gender, race, class and nation, and how gendered food-producing identities, in the Caribbean and beyond, navigate and are reproduced by the political economy; secondly, exploring questions of politics and power between states, capital and food producers in the global food system, and relations between human and nonhuman actors, with a particular focus on the dairy sector; and, thirdly, envisioning ways of generating greater justice in global, regional, national and local food systems as a whole. She has conducted fieldwork in the Caribbean, New Zealand and across the UK. Merisa draws on a range of qualitative methods to underpin this work: historical archival research, interviews, ethnography and visual analysis. 

Research interests:  

• gender, politics and power
• feminist international political economy
• food, agriculture and the environment
• human and nonhuman actors
• feminist epistemologies and methodologies

Current and Recent Projects 

Principal Investigator, Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, Cultivating Power: Gender, Race and Food in the (Post)Colonial Political Economy, 2025-2026.

Co-lead author, State of SIDS Report: Chapter Two (Safe, Healthy and Prosperous Societies: Health Systems, Gender and Youth Empowerment, Leave No-One Behind), Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative (RESI): ODI Global, 2025-2026.

Principal Investigator, British Academy/Leverhulme Trust, Intersections of Gender, Race and Class: The Impact of Colonial Legacies on Contemporary Food and Agricultural Policy in the Caribbean, 2022-2024. 

Research Fellow, N8 Agrifood/HEFCE, Global Food Justice, 2016-2019.