Keston Perry

Assistant Professor
Department: Department of African American Studies
kperry@afam.ucla.edu
Website
Keywords: African Diaspora, Political Economy, Caribbean, Racism

Keston K. Perry is a political economist whose teaching and research centers on race, reparations, plantation economy, colonialism and climate change, Caribbean political economy and economic history, and global finance and governance. Based on interdisciplinary research and scholarship, his work examines the entanglements of race as an economic ordering driver in the climate crisis, capitalism and related global financial arrangements, and their implications on marginalized communities in the African diaspora, especially the Caribbean region. He investigates how global financial system and international climate policy affects Caribbean societies in the context of intersecting economic and ecological crises. His work appreciates that development and climate finance and global governing arrangements reproduce marginalization and dispossession specifically in the Caribbean. His work is published widely in a number of international academic journals and popular media outlets. He is currently working on a book manuscript on plantation imperialism, climate reparations and the implications of cascading ecological and economic calamities for ‘radical humanism’ in the Caribbean. He has worked and lived throughout the Caribbean, United States, and the United Kingdom. He was also an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College, USA, lecturer (assistant professor) in Economics at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK and a postdoctoral scholar at the Climate Policy Lab, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. In 2021, Dr Perry served as an Economic Affairs Officer and consultant at the Division of Globalization and Development Strategies of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). In January 2022, he assumed the position of Associate Editor of the international academic journal Geoforum, and sits on the editorial board of the Review of Radical Political Economics. He recently served as an expert consultant on a podcast series “Cotton Capital” that was produced by Guardian Media Limited UK on the role of the organization in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the possibility of reparations. He has spoken widely on issues of Caribbean economic development, climate reparations, ecological justice and the relationship to colonialism and imperialism. He earned his PhD at SOAS, University of London in 2017 and is a graduate of the University of the West Indies and Newcastle University, UK.