Dr Shelda-Jane Smith

Early Career Fellow 2021-22

Youth Futures in the Caribbean: Unsettling the Coloniality of Global Mental Health through Desire-Based Research

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. 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.

More information

Research outcomes

Smith, S. J., Greenidge, A., & Gahman, L. (2022).

Unsettling orthodoxy via epistemological jailbreak: Rethinking childhood, psychology, and wellbeing from the Caribbean. Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 7(1–3), 17–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2022.2043773

Blog posts

“There Will Be a Time…”

The authors reflect on a participatory action research project undertaken with young people in Belize.

Areas of interest

Human Geography Medical Sociology Environmental Humanities Science & Technology Studies Philosophy of Science Health Geography

Cohort

ECF7

Biography

Shelda-Jane Smith is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Liverpool.

Shelda-Jane received her Ph.D. from the University of Liverpool, Department of Public Health and Policy. Her doctoral research was an ethnography of the pediatric clinical and caregiving practices surrounding the transition to adult services for youth with neuro-disabilities and epilepsy and is the focus of her book Neurodivergent Youthhoods: Adolescent Rites of Passage, Disability and the Teenage Epilepsy Clinic.

Shelda-Jane works across disciplinary frameworks of medical sociology, environmental humanities, science and technology studies [STS], philosophy of science, and critical health geographies. Broadly speaking, her research considers the relations between human health - both physical and psychological - and our sociocultural and physical environments.

Biographical details correct as of 16.01.25