Shela Sheikh

lecturer and researcher

Shela Sheikh is senior lecturer at the University of London Institute in Paris, Paris. Her research and teaching— which she considers as inherently linked—are highly interdisciplinary, falling within the broader fields of post/decolonial cultural studies, environmental humanities, and international politics.

She is co-editor with Ros Gray, of a special issue of Third Text entitled “The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions” (Spring 2018). Sheikh is currently working on a monograph, Rehearsing 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, she asks 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.