Maël Lavenaire is a Caribbean and Latin America historian and a Research Fellow in Racial Inequality at the LSE International Inequalities Institute, working in the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE) programme.
Beyond his PhD work on Decolonisation and Social Change in the French Antilles (1946-1961), Maël specialises in a sociohistorical approach to social change in the American/Caribbean post-slavery societies from the abolitions of slavery in the 19th century to these days. He currently works on a research project aiming at enlightening the foundations, the process, the factors and the mechanisms involved in the pervasiveness of the socio-racial inequalities despite the “emancipation” including Jamaica, the French Antilles (Guadeloupe and Martinique) and the Southern United States. His contribution intends to demonstrate that social sciences and policy makers are unable to profoundly comprehend the contemporary challenges determined by a high degree of inequalities in the former plantation societies established on the colonial slavery, without examining them today in the frame of the post-slavery plantation societies.