ISRF Early Career Fellow 2022-23
ISRF Early Career Fellow 2022-23
Shelda-Jane is an early career scholar with a background in critical psychology and social studies of health and disability. Her work aims to understand the sociocultural and political determinants of physical and mental health by focussing on both institutional and grassroots practices of health and care. In particular, she is interested in the growing field of global mental health as a Western biomedical project that takes neuropsychological and normative conceptions of the ‘healthy’ body and mind and attempts to apply them to all people, in all places. Instead, Shelda-Jane’s work seeks local strategies, practices, and understandings of wellness that can inform wider frameworks to improve overall human and planetary health.
Before joining The University of Liverpool’s Power, Space and Cultural Change Unit, Shelda-Jane received her PhD in Public Health and worked as a clinical psychology researcher within the NHS. She is a co-author of Building Better Worlds: Ideas and Inspiration from the Zapatistas (Bristol University Press) and is currently writing a sole-authored book (Routledge) based on her doctoral research exploring UK neuro-psychological healthcare programmes for young people as they transition from paediatric to adult services. Committed to developing an engaged anticolonial research praxis, Shelda-Jane brings together the various strands of her work –– including local community organisation, artistic practice, and academic scholarship –– to develop an eclectic and creative scholarly approach that is practice-orientated and relevant to the communities that she works with. Thus far, the context of her work has been located in the United Kingdom, Caribbean, and Central America.
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].