Riyad A. Shahjahan

I am deeply honored to be nominated for the Vice President position at CIES. Growing up across multiple regions of the world and trained in both the biomedical and social sciences, I have long experienced academia as a hybrid space—often with a sense of partial belonging. While not perfect, CIES has been an exception. This association offered a home for both my scholarly work and my embodied self. It is one of the few spaces where I have felt I truly belonged—where I could thrive, speak fully, and learn with others, often over food, drinks, or conversations on a couch.

My vision for CIES is to strengthen its role as an epistemic and ontological bridge-builder—not only across disciplines, researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and geographic contexts, but also across different ways of knowing and being. We live in a world shaped by climate change, trade wars, ethnonationalism, violent conflict, displacement, and the expanding influence of AI. These forces are absorbed through our physical bodies, families, and social worlds—often most intensely by those considered the Other. CIES can and should remain a space where care, plurality, and relationality are actively cultivated.

I also believe CIES can bridge academic work and embodied life, including practitioners whose knowledge emerges from lived and community-based work. Academia has long privileged mind-supremacist knowledge, erasing the emotional, embodied sensorial, intuitive, and relational. In collaboration with others, as Vice President, I would make space for these ways of knowing, as essential to scholarship and practice.

I want to honor the process of our work—the highs and lows, triumphs, messiness, precarity, uncertainty, doubt, and impostor syndrome that accompany scholarly, policy, and practitioner labor. Too often, only products and outcomes—research findings, reports, metrics—are valued. CIES can celebrate process alongside outcomes, especially when much of our impact remains beyond our control. CIES can be a collective where we acknowledge that we are vulnerable beings, not just human doings.

I envision CIES promoting wellness across academic, practitioner, and policy spaces while examining how institutions perpetuate ‘unwellness’ through interconnected inequalities. My approach would be grounded in humility, gratitude, and care, with a commitment to working collectively to surface, challenge, and thoughtfully engage hierarchies so that CIES can continue to grow as an inclusive, reflective, and transformative scholarly community.