Dr Shela Sheikh

Summary of research interests and expertise

• Post- and Decolonial Cultural Studies 
• Globalization, Internationalism and Southern Epistemologies  
• Environmental Humanities, Post- and Decolonial Ecologies  
• Human and Non-Human Rights, Environmental Justice  
• Testimony, Performativity and Theatricality  
• Global Arts  

My research and teaching – which I view as inherently linked – are highly interdisciplinary, falling within the broader fields of post/decolonial cultural studies, environmental humanities and international politics.

Since my PhD, I have worked consistently on the theme of testimony. From 2013 to 2014, I was Research Associate and Publications Coordinator with the ERC-funded, multi-disciplinary research agency, Forensic Architecture(Opens in new window), who have increasingly investigated environmental violence and ecocide alongside human rights abuses. This prompted me to expand my interest in witnessing and testimony within the arts and humanities to the broader fields of human rights, humanitarianism, geography/spatial politics, legal theory and environmental justice.  

Since 2016, in dialogue with co-authors/editors and through numerous workshops and publications, I have contributed to developing the field of ‘postcolonial ecologies’, a subfield of Environmental Humanities and Post/Decolonial Studies. Notable here is the introduction to the special issue of Third Text, ‘The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions’ (2018), which I co-edited with Dr Ros Gray. The special issue brought together environmentalism and postcolonialism through the specific lens of contemporary art practices that explore and intervene in the cultures, politics and systems of representation generated by human interaction with the soil. I have also developed work around the cultural politics, epistemologies and systems of representation of botany, for instance in the international conference co-organised with Professor Matthew Fuller, ‘Cultivation: Vegetal Lives, Global Systems and the Politics of Planting’(Opens in new window) in 2016. 

Since 2018, I have lectured internationally and published on ‘more-than-human’ witnessing collectivities, proposing that seminal twentieth-century humanities literature be de-anthropocentrised and placed in conversation with the posthumanities, postcolonialism and critical indigenous studies in order to respond to the legal, political, epistemological and aesthetic challenges of contemporary environmental violence.  

I am currently working on a monograph, Staging Environmental Justice. Here the crime of ecocide, as a violation of both human and nonhuman rights, is examined in relation to a variety of forums for testimony. Addressing global people’s tribunals alongside staged trials and hearings, I ask what environmental justice might look like within and beyond the framework of international law and how experimental, speculative forums can enact a decolonial imaginary of environmental justice. I address artistic, theatrical and grassroots activist works from West Africa, India and Europe and recent people’s assemblies, including practices of ‘abolitionist ecologies’ and demands for environmental reparations. Part of this was presented at a performative event I co-convened at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt(Opens in new window) (Berlin) in 2022.

As much as writing and engaging with theory, I thrive on working with practitioners such as artists, performers, architects, lawyers and activists, both in the classroom and beyond. I regularly take part in and organise public lectures, seminars and workshops in cultural spaces globally. Across my research and teaching I am interested in the propositional – rather than simply representational – role of contemporary art and performance practices. As such, I do not approach art works and cultural events as ‘objects of analysis’, but as tools and catalysts through which to re-think key concepts within international politics and to potentially perform politics otherwise.

Born in Kenya and raised in the UK, I have in recent years spent an increasing amount of time moving between the UK and France and am invested in grappling with the echoes and divergences between the postcolonial presents of the two countries, as well as their former colonies.

Research projects & supervisions

I am committed to the practice of editing and publishing, which I understand in the expanded sense of ‘making publics’ and shaping fields of research and debate. I have co-edited numerous publications, which have been accompanied by workshops and public programmes.

Currently I sit on the editorial board, together with Professor Jennifer Gabrys (Cambridge) and Dr Ros Gray (Goldsmiths), of the ‘Planetarities’ series with Goldsmiths Press/MIT Press(Opens in new window). This series of short books investigates the rise of research and practice that attends to earthly and planetary concerns, which are unfolding at a time of multiple environmental crises. Drawing on, extending and reworking Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of ‘planetarity’, the transdisciplinary series – which seeks to advance theoretical, experimental and practice-based work – takes up the distinct types of ‘planet-thought’ and ‘planet-feeling’ that emerge at this moment of planetary distress.

In conjunction with members of the Observatoire Terre-Monde(Opens in new window), which draws attention to the diversity of ecological issues inherent in the French so-called Overseas Territories, I am part of the editorial board of a forthcoming journal (to be launched in September 2023) that seeks to address ecological issues from a pluriversal, decolonial perspective, centring voices from the global south as well as the challenges of translation and access to knowledge. I act as peer-reviewer for journals and publishers such as Theory, Culture & Society, Subjectivity, Third World Quarterly, Geohumanities, Cultural Critique, and Bloomsbury.

Research projects

From 2017 to 2022, I was Co-Lead of the Goldsmiths Critical Ecologies Research Stream(Opens in new window). Between 2013 and 2014, I was Publications Coordinator and Research Fellow on the ERC-funded Forensic Architecture project based at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Advisory

I am currently a Board Member of Border Forensics(Opens in new window), an agency that mobilises innovative methods of spatial and visual analysis to investigate practices of border violence, and to foster strategies of border justice. I have served as nominator for the Next Generation Prince Claus Awards(Opens in new window) and as curatorial advisor for the Visible Project Award. I continue to be an Independent Advisor to Forensic Architecture.

PhD supervision

I welcome proposals in the research areas as listed above. I currently supervise three PhD students working in the fields of post/decolonial studies, ecology, botany and plant studies, contemporary art, refugee and spatial politics, and critical animal studies. I have co-supervised nine PhD students to completion, of whom three had Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding. I have examined PhDs at Goldsmiths (University of London), University of Westminster, and Birkbeck (University of London).