Signature keynote talks.
In Jamaican culture, the rules of gender and power in relationships are everywhere and nowhere at once — in the music, in the yard, in the church, in the bedroom, and in the silence between what is said and what is meant. Jamaican men and women have recently undergone radical shifts in gender roles and […]
Jamaicans love fiercely. They also fight fiercely, forgive selectively, and carry emotional wounds with a stoicism the rest of the world sometimes mistakes for strength. The way Jamaicans navigate intimacy, loyalty, betrayal, and romantic love is the product of a specific post-colonial, cultural and psychological inheritance that most Jamaicans have never had explained to them […]
You fell in love with the accent. The confidence. The way they walked into a room like they owned it. What nobody told you is that loving a Jamaican comes with its own unwritten rulebook, its own emotional language, its own deeply specific cultural logic. Dr. Ragashanti not only presents from his colorful dating experiences […]
Jamaica is one of the most visited, most commodified, and most misunderstood markets in the world. Every year, brands, investors, and operators engage the Caribbean — and Jamaica in particular — with strategies built on surface-level assumptions rather than substantive cultural knowledge. The result is missed opportunities, brand missteps, community friction, and significant commercial underperformance. […]
Jamaica has been called the most homophobic place on earth. Jamaica’s Dancehall culture has been accused of producing “murder music” and advocacy aimed at harming gays. In actuality, though, Jamaica and Dancehall have also produced some of the most complex, layered, and quietly subversive expressions of gender and sexuality in the African diaspora. Both sides […]
The Jamaican language, Patwa (patois), is the source of numerous intriguing debates. The gamut of people’s impressions of Patwa runs from absolute ridicule and dismissal to euphoric celebration. However, when we understand that languages carry culture, culture carries identity, and identity carries existence, we can better appreciate the multilayered sophistication of Patwa in the Jamaican […]
It’s a little cliche and a restating of the obvious, but it’s still quite true … the quality of our lives are directly the results of our choices. However, how to authoritatively balance our choices with the demands of our circumstances has long proved tricky for many. Transformation is not an event. It is a […]
The hardest move in any human transformation is not really the actual work – it is the necessary shift in worldview that defines the quality and impact of the work. Dr. Ragashanti names the specific internal pivot that changed his life — the switch from living as an automaton activating predefined external scripts, to becoming […]
Every culture hands its children a set of unwritten instructions on how to be a person. Some of those instructions are gifts. Some are weapons pointed at their own heart. Drawing on his training in anthropology, counseling psychology, and clinical practice — and on the hard-won results of rewriting himself from the inside out — […]
Before the Ph.D. from UConn, before the Fordham Law degree, before radio and television studios and the practice in counseling psychology, there was a Jamaican streetboy running afoul with the law — who was also committed to government Boys’ Homes, then jailed three times over. Dr. Ragashanti delivers the keynote only he can deliver: the […]