“Promoting erotic sovereignty and sexual justice through mindfulness as a means of neurodecolonization, unlearning coloniality and ethical relationality
multiepistemic sexual literacy through transformative learning and pluriversal understanding.”
Dr. Zelaika Hepworth Clarke
is the first Jamerican (Jamaican-American) to receive three degrees in human sexuality from accredited universities in the United States: Bachelors of Arts from NYU in Sexuality, Culture and Oppression (2007); Masters of Education in Human Sexuality(2012) and Doctorate of Philosophy in Human Sexuality (2015) from the Center for Human Sexuality Studies at Widener University. Dr.Clarke is also a graduate of the International School of Transnational Decolonial Black Feminism in Cachoeira, Brazil, from the Decolonizing Knowledge and Power Summer School in Barcelona, Catalonia (Spain), and hold a certificate in Advocacy in Reproductive Health and HIV/AIDS from the Center for African Family Studies in Nairobi, Kenya.
Dr. Clarke specializes in human sexualities, gender and relational diversity, clinical and cultural sexology, sexosophy, sexecology, African-centered social work, anti-racist sexuality education, critical autoethnography, and Ọ̀ṣunality, an African-centered, sex-positive, post-colonial paradigm that affirms diversity in sensuality, sexual pleasure and eroticism. Dr.Clarke’s passions include increasing critical thinking, expanding self-awareness and self-reflexivity, empowerment, counter-oppressive discourses, unlearning colonial mentalities, decolonial considerations, mindfulness, justices (social, racial, erotic, epistemic, ecological etc) and healing.
Dr. Clarke co-founded a sexuality studies concentration program that is committed to social justice at Goddard College in Vermont. This is the first (anti-racist, anti-imperialist) sexuality studies program in the United States founded by scholars of color at a PWI. Dr. Clarke co-created with (Dr. Herukhuti) the Decolonial SAR , and Sexual Attitude Restructuring/Reassessment program that highlights unlearning settler colonial sexualities, genders and relationship configuration narratives while centering on pre-colonial and decolonial perspectives and promoting multi-epistemic sexual literacy. Dr. Clarke is currently providing therapeutic, educational, and consulting services with the Pluriversity. The Pluriversity is an organization committed to increasing multi-epistemic sexual literacy through transformative learning.
