ISRF Early Career Fellow 2022-23
ISRF Early Career Fellow 2022-23
Levi Gahman works in the University of Liverpool’s Power, Space, and Cultural Change Unit and remains an affiliate faculty member with the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies. His efforts are broadly aimed at resolving alienation, exploitation, and planetary ruin, as well as ensuring that research is put in the service of the material and psycho-spiritual wellbeing of communities in struggle. More specifically, Levi’s areas of focus include anticolonial praxis, movement-engaged participatory research, environmental defence, gender justice, and global health, which coincide with efforts he is involved in related to democratising knowledge and ensuring that research is relevant to those with whom he collaborates.
Prior to arriving at Liverpool, Levi began his career in the Global South and lived in the Caribbean and Central America for half a decade where he focused on development justice, emancipatory politics, social change, and the writings of Frantz Fanon. He now continues to work and write alongside autonomous social movements, rural landworkers, and grassroots organisers who are fighting for land, dignity, and self-determination. Levi is also the author of Land, God, and Guns: Settler Colonialism and Masculinity (Zed Scholar); Building Better Worlds: Ideas and Inspiration from the Zapatistas (Bristol University Press); and former managing editor of the non-corporate, open-access journal ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies. Along the way, he has spent time as a sawmill labourer, farmhand, warehouse worker, substance abuse counsellor, trauma therapist, disability support associate, solidarity brigade member, and international human rights observer.
Colonial power has (dis)ordered the world as we know and live in it, as well as our prevailing notions of “modernity,” “development,” and even existence. Amidst this reality, youth voices on present-day climate and health crises are going unheard. Indeed, the disavowal of the political agency, aspirations, and dreams of young people regarding the co-creation of socially-just and environmentally-sustainable futures remains a persistent issue of exclusion. Moreover, the insights young people have about correcting enduring historical injustices and ideas they hold about living well in the Anthropocene continue to be dismissed in policy and scholarship. This is especially the case for youth from negatively racialised and marginalised communities in the Majority World/Global South. As a response and via “desire-based” methods developed with co-researchers in the Caribbean, this participatory project will expand knowledge on youth futures by unsettling liberal-Eurocentric conceptions of wellness, sustainability, and “global health” with Indigenous and Afrodescendant youth.
If you would like to contact any of our Fellows to discuss their ISRF-funded work, please contact Dr Lars Cornelissen (Academic Editor) in the first instance, at [email protected].