Anthro-poets from East Port-of-Spain’s Yards: Spoken Word as Arts-based Methodology for Ethnography in Urban Trinidad and Tobago

This multimedia presentation features the performances of four spoken word poets from East Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. During the period December 2024 to February 2025, we designed and facilitated a virtual spoken word workshop that applied arts-based pedagogies for ethnographic research. Through ethnographic observation and note-taking, poets and collaborators produced place-based analyses of social hierarchies, solidarities and inequalities in their communities in the form of spoken word. The literary and ethnographic imagination was articulated from the immediate environment of the yard, establishing this site of material culture as a central locus for communal and political insight. This multimedia presentation demonstrates the utility of ethnographic and literary insights to explore everyday life and politics in urban Trinidad and Tobago, with the poets serving as research collaborators in this co-created ethnography.