Book Talk: Decolonial Care
Tuesday, Feb 24, 2026 | 4:30pm – 6:00pm EST | Arrupe Hall Multipurpose Room, Georgetown University Main Campus | RSVP (Registration required).
Hosted by Gender+ Justice Initiative
Co-sponsored by Women’s and Gender Studies Program , Department of Black Studies , Department of French and Francophone Studies , Global Health Institute , Berkley School of Nursing , and Medical Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University.
Join us for a book talk with Prof. Jennifer Boum Make discussing her latest publication, Decolonial Care Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2025).
This talk will be moderated by Prof. Lauren Arrington, Assistant Professor and Susan H. Mayer Endowed Professor in Health Equity at Berkley School of Nursing, Georgetown University and former 25′ G+JI Fellow.
Decolonial Care examines how colonial legacies shape caregiving practices in the French Caribbean. Drawing on novels, graphic narratives, and curatorial discourse, the book explores four key sites at the intersection of care and colonialism: gendered care roles, domestic service, the nurturing of human life and environments, and curation as a form of care. Boum Make argues that reimagining care requires reckoning with colonial systems rooted in disregard for human and ecological life. Bringing postcolonial studies and care studies into dialogue, the book shows how cultural narratives both expose the harms of colonialism and offer decolonial approaches to sustaining livable worlds.
About the Author:
Dr. Jennifer Boum Make is a literary and visual studies scholar and Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University, with affiliations in the Medical Humanities Initiative and the African Studies Program. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2019.
Her research focuses on the French Caribbean, the legacies of colonialism and the French Atlantic slave trade, and care studies, with particular attention to how cultural narratives engage questions of care, violence, and survival in postcolonial contexts.
Free and open to all.
___
Accommodation requests can be made at genderjustice@georgetown.edu