She works in partnership with grassroots women's organizations in Nicaragua and Tanzania to privilege the activism and voices of marginalized women in the pursuit of women's human rights. She uses a multi-method approach from within psychology to provide the currently missing, but necessary links between transnational feminism, the discourse on women's human rights and globalization, and the international attention given to women's "empowerment" to help support strategies and interventions aimed at social change by local women. In her academic work, Shelly employs frameworks informed by feminist liberation psychology, human rights discourse, decolonial feminism, and social justice to organize her research, teaching, and outreach. She is the author of Narrating a Psychology of Resistance: Voices of the Compañeras in Nicaragua (Oxford University Press, 2016).