Android :: Accessing Shared Preferences Through Static Methods

I have some information stored as SharedPreferences. I need to access that information from outsite an Activity (in from a domain model class). So I created a static method in an Activity which I only use to get the shared preferences. This is giving me some problems, since apparently it is not possible to call the method "getSharedPreferences" from a static method. Here's the message eclipse is giving me:
Cannot make a static reference to the non-static method
getSharedPreferences(String, int) from the type ContextWrapper

I tried to work around this by using an Activity instance, like this:
public static SharedPreferences getSharedPreferences () {
Activity act = new Activity();
return act.getSharedPreferences("FILE", 0);
}

This code gives a null point exception. Is there a work-around? Am I going into an android-code-smell by trying to do this?