Jamaican-born scholar wins Oxford prize for book on Black women and political power
KINGSTON, Jamaica — A Jamaican-born scholar based in Canada has won an international award from Oxford University Press for her upcoming book examining the political lives and experiences of Black women in Jamaica.
According to Toronto Metropolitan University news outlet Toronto Met Today, Professor Lahoma Thomas of the university’s Department of Criminology has been awarded the 2025 Early Career Researcher First Book Prize by Oxford University Press. Toronto Met Today reported that Thomas is the only Canadian recipient of the inaugural prize.
The award recognises scholars working on their first academic book within six years of completing a PhD or first academic appointment.
Thomas’s forthcoming book, Black Women and the Politics of Respect in Jamaica: “Seeing from Da Yaad,” expected in 2027, explores how women in Kingston’s inner-city communities navigate political authority, state power and dignity.
“It reflects confidence in the questions the book brings to the study of political life,” Thomas said. “It affirms the importance of understanding Black political life not only through formal institutions, but through everyday relationships and practices that often go unseen.”
Toronto Met Today noted that Thomas’s research is rooted in her Caribbean connections and her view of the region as a powerful space for political thought.
Her work also examines the 2010 protest in Kingston when thousands of women dressed in white demonstrated against the extradition of former Tivoli Gardens strongman Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke to the United States.
According to Toronto Met Today, Thomas argues that women’s support for certain community leaders in Jamaica’s garrison communities cannot be explained solely by coercion or financial benefit, but is often tied to questions of dignity, legitimacy and respect.
“This project is a refusal of narratives that reduce Black communities to sites of crime,” Thomas said, according to Toronto Met Today. “It listens to how people themselves understand political life.”
Thomas previously worked as a social worker supporting survivors of sexual violence before entering academia, and her research has long focused on how women navigate violence and uncertainty while creating possibilities for survival and dignity.
Her book is expected to be published in 2027.
