Dr. Shelene Gomes

Lecturer - Department of Behavioural Sciences

The Faculty of Social Sciences – Department of Behavioural Sciences (Sociology Unit)

The University of the West Indies
St. Augustine
Trinidad and Tobago

Telephone: 868-662-2002 (Ext. 82710)
Email: Shelene.Gomes@sta.uwi.edu

I am a Sociocultural Anthropologist trained at the University of St. Andrews (Scotland), the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) London and Barnard College, Columbia University. I teach courses in Social Anthropology and the Sociology of Culture and Development with research interests in Caribbean cosmopolitanism, migration, mobilities, climate justice as well as the politics of race, class and gender. I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in East Africa tracing the linkages between African diasporic imaginings and Caribbean cosmopolitan sensibilities. 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. My current interdisciplinary research examines the political economy of Caribbean kinship through migrant women’s social reproductive labour in the care economy. I jointly authored the Commonwealth Secretariat Facilitator’s Guide for Measuring the Economic Cost of Violence Against Women and Girls (2022), with guidelines for Small States. I am a member of the Globalization, Accessibility, Innovation and Care Research Network with participants in Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean.

I am open to postgraduate research supervision in these additional areas: citizenship, decolonial cosmopolitanism, feminist praxis, queer subjectivities, advocacy, cultural hybridity, narrative and ethnography, nationalism, youth subjectivities, the Global South broadly defined as well as the politics of development and the Anthropocene.

I am a Visiting Scholar in Residence with the Department of Anthropology, University of Cape Town, 2023-2024.