Directory of Research and Expertise

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Research Summary and Profile

Research interests:

Civil Rights, Colonies & Colonization, emigration & immigration, Communities, Classes, Races, Cultural memory, Globalization & Development, Human rights, International Law, Politics

Research keywords:

postcolonial studies, environmental justice, post/decolonial ecologies, human and nonhuman rights, globalization, internationalism and southern epistemologies, testimony, performativity, global arts, International politics

Regions:

Africa, Asia, Caribbean, Europe, Middle East, South America, United Kingdom

Summary of research interests and expertise:

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, 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-organized with Professor Matthew Fuller, ‘Cultivation: Vegetal Lives, Global Systems and the Politics of Planting’ in 2016.

Since 2018, I have lectured internationally and published on alternative forums and epistemologies for testifying to environmental violence. This has included ‘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, 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, 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, ‘Performing Environmental Justice’, that I co-convened with theatre director Zuleikha Chaudhari at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (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.

 

Languages:

	Spoken	Written
French	Intermediate	Intermediate

Publication Details

Related publications/articles:

Date	Details
01-Sep-2025	Ecology, Commoning, and Piracy: Thinking with Sakiya Chapters Sheikh, Shela (forthcoming 2025). Ecology, Commoning, and Piracy: Thinking with Sakiya. In: Nida Sinnokrot: Palestine is Not a Garden, ed. Anthony Downey. Berlin; Massachusetts: Sternberg Press; MIT Press
04-Dec-2023	Art and Witnessing: The Poetics and Politics of Testifying to Environmental Violence Chapters Sheikh, Shela (2023) Art and Witnessing: The Poetics and Politics of Testifying to Environmental Violence. In: Art and Knowledge since 1900, ed. James Fox and Vid Simoniti. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. ISBN: 978152616426
01-Sep-2021	Speculative Justice as Decolonial Intervention: The Aesthetics and Politics of the Bureau des Dépositions Journal articles Marboeuf, Olivier; Shela Sheikh (2021) Speculative Justice as Decolonial Intervention: The Aesthetics and Politics of the Bureau des Dépositions. estetica: studi e ricerche, no. 1. ISSN 2039-6635  The Bureau des Dépositions (Bureau of Depositions) is an ensemble of ten co-authors with varying legal and administrative statuses, the majority of whom were born and lived in Guinea, West Africa, prior to making their journey to France in 2016 or 2017 in order to demand asylum. The Bureau, declared an immaterial work, also comprises a series of performances and ongoing research-creation processes that are signed in co-authorship. This includes the performance Exercises de justice spéculative (Exercises in Speculative Justice), through which the Bureau’s co-dependence is asserted in the face of deportation orders from France that threaten both the lives of the undocumented members and the work that is the Bureau des Dépositions. Through the strategic use of French laws that protect the integrity of art works, author’s rights (droits d’auteur) are mobilised in order to petition for the co-authors’ right to remain in France, with the gamble here being that this could potentially be more effective than appealing to rights of asylum or the sanctity of human (non-citizen) life. As such, the Bureau seeks to create (legal) precedence and participate in the processual transformation of law and life. The performance is not simply about migratory violence, but is a speculative work whose «transformative properties» are used in order to protect the lives of the artists – a work that both points to the limitations of existing (Western) justice and exceeds it, suggesting an alternative conception of justice embodied by the Bureau. Having witnessed the Exercises in October 2020 in Marseille, we provide a narrative of the work, its genesis and precedents, and a series of reflections upon themes raised, including: the representation of minority speech within and beyond contemporary art, economies of testimony, intellectual property rights and collective creative practices, histories of sans papiers activism in France, the production of criminal lives, a politics of the living and the performance of justice. In our reading, the work enacts a decolonial aesthetics that intervenes through an alternative framework of representation and justice. An English translation of a partial score of the Exercises de justice spéculative performance is also included.
19-Feb-2020	After Capital: Towards Alternative Worlds Review Sheikh, Shela (2020) After Capital: Towards Alternative Worlds. Subjectivity, vol. 13, issue 1. pp. 148–51. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-020-00085-x
25-Sep-2018	Editors’ Introduction: The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions Journal articles Gray, Ros; Shela Sheikh (2018) Editors’ Introduction: The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions. Third Text, 32(2-3), pp. 163-175. ISSN 0952-8822  This article-length editorial introduction to the special issue of Third Text, ‘The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions’, brings 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. The article has been re-published in French, Spanish and Catalan.
01-Sep-2018	The Future of the Witness: Nature, Race and More-than-Human Environmental Publics Journal articles Sheikh, Shela. 2018. The Future of the Witness: Nature, Race and More-than-Human Environmental Publics. Kronos: Southern African Histories, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 145–162. ISSN 0259-0190  Taking leave from obstacles to the creation of an ‘environmental public’ in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa and the political silencing and objectification of both nature and racialised individuals, this article interrogates and seeks to expand a specific figure: that of the witness. Drawing from testimony theory, humanitarianism, literary studies, political theory, environmental humanities, Anthropocene studies, post- and decolonial theory, visual cultures, citizen science and speculative feminist practices, the article has been notable in developing the conceptual framework of ‘more-than-human witnessing’ in the context of environmental violence and is referenced regularly in environmental humanities literature.
18-Jul-2018	‘Planting Seeds/The Fires of War’: The Geopolitics of Seed Saving in Jumana Manna’s Wild Relatives Journal articles Sheikh, Shela. 2018. ‘Planting Seeds/The Fires of War’: The Geopolitics of Seed Saving in Jumana Manna’s Wild Relatives’. Third Text 151, vol. 32, no. 2. DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2018.1483899 Through a reading of Jumana Manna’s feature-length film, Wild Relatives (2018), this article explores the geopolitics of seed saving, reading global efforts to preserve genetic biodiversity in the face of climate change through the logic of the pharmakon (ie, as both poison and cure). The film follows the journey of seeds between the Global Seed Vault at Svalbard (Norway) and the Bekaa Valley (Lebanon), where seeds from Syria are being cultivated due to the ongoing civil war, probing the relationship between the preservation and (re)patriation of seeds on the one hand and global conflict and humanitarianism on the other, and considering local cultivation practices vis-à-vis the lasting legacies of the developmentalist, geopolitical agendas of the US-sponsored Green Revolution. The article situates the film within Manna’s broader oeuvre, problematising the epistemological and temporal logic of heritage practices that seek to preserve both cultural and natural diversity. As such, the article demonstrates the neo-orientalist and neo-colonial logic of cryopreservation as a form of ‘imperialist nostalgia’ or techno-capitalist wizardry. Adapting anthropologist Michael Taussig’s notion of ‘agribusiness writing’ to the institutionalised, globalised images and narratives of productivity, bio-conservation and peacemaking, Wild Relatives is interpreted as a form of ‘apotropaic’ (‘countermagical’) film-making that warns against the appropriative, ‘green banking’ and ‘green washing’ logic of techno-scientific sorcery and celebrates the reciprocal, co-evolutionary plant–human relations of which the seed itself is an archive.
01-May-2018	Uriel Orlow: Theatrum Botanicum Edited Book Sheikh, Shela and Uriel Orlow, eds. (2018) Uriel Orlow: Theatrum Botanicum. Berlin: Sternberg Press
03-Mar-2014	Forensic Theater: Grupa Spomenik’s Pythagorean Lecture––Mathemes of Re-association Chapters Sheikh, Shela (2014) Forensic Theater: Grupa Spomenik’s Pythagorean Lecture––Mathemes of Re-association. In: Forensic Architecture, ed. Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
03-Mar-2014	Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth Edited Book Forensic Archirecture (Anselm Franke, Thomas Keenan, Francesco Sebregondi, Shela Sheikh, Susan Schuppli, Eyal Weizman), eds. (2014) Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. Berlin: Sternberg Press

Research Projects & Supervisions

Research projects:

Details

Ecologies of Publishing / Écologies de l'édition The seminar series brings together scholars and practitioners to explore a range of practices and politics of publishing. This series is organised by Dr Shela Sheikh with assistance from Nuha Halim and Mary Thomas, with support from the University of London Convocation Trust. The series builds upon the University’s increasing commitment to open-access publishing and advocacy for public humanities. By conceiving publishing worlds as ecologies, the series aims to examine and deconstruct conditions of production and reception related to ecological degradation, colonialism, capitalism and knowledge hierarchies. It raises questions about inclusivity, alternative copyright models and access to knowledge, and challenges traditional peer-reviewing, translation and distribution processes. Given the manifold emergencies of the global climate crisis, publications about ecology are proliferating. But besides publishing about ecology, how are practices and politics of publishing to be conceived as ecologies, with ecology understood as not simply pertaining to the environment but as webs of relations between humans and non-humans – conditions of existence – including power dynamics and conditions of production? Given that the global climate crisis is linked to ongoing forms of colonialism, as well as capitalist extraction, patriarchy and uneven hierarchization of both knowledge and representation (i.e., the question of who gets to speak about what, whose knowledge is valued), how might practices of publishing respond to the root causes of ecological degradation, both in content and form? For scholars and publishers (professional or activist) alike, a number of further questions arise. For instance: how do we make practices of publishing less hierarchical and more inclusive? What alternative models are there to restrictive copyright, and how is the history of intellectual property rights that undergirds the profit-making drive of publishing corporations linked to the history of ecological dispossession (via colonialism, extractivism, biopiracy) as well as vaccine apartheids, for instance? What do we mean by “access to knowledge” and what might that look like? How to extract ourselves from purely commercial logics that govern so much of publishing? What can we learn from feminist editorial practices? How can practices of commoning function together with translation, as peer-to-peer (P2P) collectives and cooperatives, to expand access to knowledge (A2K) all the while assuring appropriate remuneration? And for those whose metier is to “produce knowledge” within the university system and who are expected to disseminate this via established channels and major publishing conglomerates, how can we make use of our (privileged/precarious, depending on contracts) conditions to work against the grain? How to re-think peer reviewing processes (which rely upon the “good will” of unpaid labour) to make these occasions for generative, supportive discussion and nurturing of ideas? And how to peer review alternative formats of written and visual (e.g., multi-modal) contributions? These are some of the questions that will be addressed by the “Ecologies of Publishing” series. Beginning with an in-person event in Paris on 28 June 2023, the series then unfolds in autumn 2023 via five online sessions, so as to allow for global participation and to reduce carbon footprint. Contributors to the seminars comprise scholars as well as practitioners with vital practical and legal knowledge. As such, the emphasis is on providing participants and audience members with invaluable technical skills alongside broader conceptual and historical considerations. The series will be accompanied by a blog page, including documentation of events, and further resources, which will be made available on this programme web page in due course. Events:  • Une journée d'études sur les communs de savoir, Le Shakirail, Paris  • Feminist editing and re-thinking peer reviewing  • Publishing ecologically  • The politics of translation  • Anti-colonial legacies and south–south archipelagos  • Zines and alternative publishing practices

Available for doctoral supervision: Yes

Professional Affiliations

Professional affiliations:

Name	Activity
Observatoire Terre-Monde	Member of editorial Committee for the OTM's journal, Plurivers: revue d'écologies décoloniales (https://plurivers.net)
Border Forensics	Board member
Forensic Architecture	Independent Advisor

Relevant Events

Other editing/publishing activities:

Date	Details
	Commissioning editor, Planetarities series (MIT and Goldsmiths Press)  The Planetarities Series 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 series takes up the distinct types of “planet-thought” and “planet-feeling” that emerge at this moment of planetary distress. The series engages with the multiple planetarities that materialize by undoing the abstractions of globalism, by expanding beyond the consolidations of the universal human, and by working toward new connections and collectives that are differentially tied to the planet. This transdisciplinary series seeks to advance theoretical, experimental and practice-based work in the area of Planetarities as a diverse and wide- ranging set of investigations that share a sense of urgency in relation to planetary troubles. Series editors: Jennifer Gabrys, Ros Gray, and Shela Sheikh
	Founding member of editorial board, Pluriverse: A Journal of Decolonial Ecology Issue co-director (with Malcom Ferdinand), Pluriverse: A Journal of Decolonial Ecology, issue 1: Decolonising Climate Change Pluriverse: A Journal of Decolonial Ecologies is published by the Observatoire Terre-Monde (www.terremonde.org). The Earth–World Observatory (L’Observatoire Terre-Monde, OTM) was born of a shared desire to highlight the diversity of ecological issues inherent in France’s so-called overseas territories and their neighboring regions. At a time when the ecological imperative requires us to collectively rethink our ways of living on Earth and living together, the Observatory aims to provide a forum for study, action, and the dissemination of research and knowledge on the ecological issues inherent in these “overseas territories”, their neighboring regions and the rest of the world. The association’s activities are currently based around five thematic areas: research, documentation, education, monitoring, and advocacy. Through these actions, we hope to help build a shared world that respects the fundamental rights and dignity of human beings, as well as those of non-humans and the Earth’s ecosystems. Pluriverse is an OTM project carried out by an editorial committee detailed later in this issue. This journal, whose purpose is discussed in the editorial introduction, seems to us to be a necessary initiative for the development and dissemination of decolonial ecology and the pluriverse An online version of the Pluriverse journal, with translations of the plurilingual contributions and supplementary multimedia content, is available open access at www.plurivers.net.

Consultancy & Media

Available for consultancy:

Yes

Media experience:

Yes

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