Dr Shelene Gomes
Lecturer
Department of Behavioural Sciences
The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus
St. Augustine
Trinidad and Tobago
Telephone: 868-662-2002 Ext 82710
Email: Shelene.Gomes @sta.uwi.edu
I teach courses in social anthropology and the sociology of culture with research interests in migration, mobilities, cosmopolitan thought and action, postcolonial religion and spirituality as well as the politics of race, class and gender. I have done ethnographic fieldwork in East Africa tracing the linkages between African diasporic imaginings and Caribbean cosmopolitan sensibilities. My current interdisciplinary research centres return migrant women's socially reproductive labours in doing unpaid care work in Trinidad. My public and scholarly writing is unified by a focus on contemporary solidarities, acts of agency and place-making within the context of unequal historical conditions of modernity. Among other venues, my work has appeared in African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, Tout Moun: Caribbean Journal of Cultural Studies, The Global South, and Virtual Brazilian Anthropology. I am open to postgraduate research supervision in these additional areas: citizenship, decolonial cosmopolitanism, feminist praxis, queer subjectivities, advocacy, cultural hybridity, narrative and ethnography, the Global South broadly defined as well as the politics of development, climate justice and the anthropocene.
Research Interests
- Ethnography, life history, migration, transnational Caribbean, politics of gendered subjectivities, cosmopolitanism.
Featured Work
- The Materiality of Love: Rastafari Transnational Livity in Shashamane, Ethiopia.” Global Feminisms and the Anti-Colonial Project Conference, Institute for Gender and Development Studies conference, UWI Cave Hill, Barbados. 21st-23rd November 2018.
- Being Faranji or Foreigner in Rastafari Ethiopia.” Caribbean Studies Association Annual Conference. Havana, Cuba. 4th-8th June 2018.
- Gomes, S. "Observations on Rastafari Cosmopolitics from the Caribbean." Anthropology News 'From 1969 to 2019.' American Anthropological Association magazine
