My research

I am an Assistant Professor at the Amsterdam Law School (UvA). My research interests are centered around the spatial and distributive effects of private and economic law. My work exposes the interconnection between legal and social change and explores how law co-constitutes and connects sites of the global economy, such as along global value chains, in financialized real estate and urban infrastructure. I am particularly interested in law’s blind spots towards emergent, systemic and cross-scale social dynamics. Towards this, my perspectives on law build on socio-legal and anthropological approaches, law & political economy and the history of legal thought.

IAS fellowship

At IAS, I will work on my project “Recoding global production”, funded by a 3-year NWO Veni grant. It investigates the translations between a recent wave of regulations targeting global value chains and the day-to-day practices of corporate and value chain governance. How, in these translations, are regulatory requirements being altered, watered down, or deflected? As one part of this project, I will analyse the role of digital tools of value chain management in operationalizing requirements of environmental and human rights ‘due diligence’. Through legal-ethnographic analysis of leading value chain software tools, I will explore how normative goals are reflected in the user interface of value chain management software and what type of value chain design and practices are favoured thereby.