Derica Shields

Derica Shields is a writer and editor whose work traces strategies for navigating epistemic violence against radical knowledge transmission, with a particular focus on Black aesthetics and cultures. In 2021, her oral history project A Heavy Nonpresence, gathering seven Black Londoners’ accounts of the British welfare state, was published by Triple Canopy with an introductory essay that outlines the co-development of the modern welfare state alongside measures to expel or instrumentalise Black peoples. She was a 2022–23 resident at Jan Van Eyck Academie, and in 2023, she gave the second annual Sylvia Wynter Lecture at King’s College London. Her book Bad Practice considers the potentials of Black failure and is forthcoming from Book Works.