Shajoe J. Lake

Shajoe is a UKRI ESRC-funded PhD candidate. His doctoral research develops an anticolonial materialist theory of international law, focusing on imperialism and One Health. His project stages an unconventional conversation between Marxist commodity form theory, Third World and Caribbean anticolonial thought, and the Black Radical Tradition, including abolitionist theory, Afro-pessimism, and Womanism. Across this work, Shajoe is especially interested in understanding the qualitative characteristics of legal form, and he centres questions of Blackness, value and being, exploring how law renders some lives legible as worthy of protection and others available for injury, neglect, and premature death.

Shajoe's project is anti-disciplinary, spanning legal analysis, critical social theory, and creative and artistic research methods, all while being beholden to none. He draws on aesthetics, affective economies, and performance as ways to track how legitimacy is felt and rehearsed, and experiments with narrative, dramaturgical forms, and other expressive methods to make visible what law tends to background: the atmospheres of coercion, the choreography of consent, and the insidious social forms. His approach is generative and critical, leveraging the power of imagination and history to think seriously about building life-worlds where long, healthy lives are not rationed by race, geography, or inherited structures of value, and the genre of the human (Man) is abolished.

Shajoe also has significant experience building and advising on a range of tactical projects. He has advised G7 countries and ministers of health across the world on the governance of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and One Health, developing novel approaches for designing global health treaties. He has also advised Caribbean and Latin American CSOs and legal practitioners on legal tactics in consumer protection litigation and health and human rights obligations, represented consumers before national standards bodies, supported petitions to constitutional reform commissions on the right to health and adequate food, and drafted reports and position papers for third sector actors on the regulation of food labels in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM).

He is currently a Research Assistant on two Wellcome Trust–funded projects examining digital health data regulation in Sub-Saharan Africa and the aftermath of death and disease in global health. Previously, at the Digital Transformations for Health Lab, he developed the Y5 Futures Framework to operationalise youth inclusion in digital health and AI governance. He was also an international legal advisor at Global Strategy Lab, Toronto, CA and a research fellow at the O’Neill Institute, Washington, DC, USA.

Shajoe holds an LLB (First Class Honours, UWI), an LLM in Global Health Law (Georgetown), and an MA in Social Science Research (Warwick). He is also a Bloomberg Philanthropies Healthy Food Policy Fellow.