DR Alessandra Mezzadri
| Biography | I am a feminist political economist of global development, particularly concerned with processes of globalisation of production, work and social reproduction. I have been trained in Economics, Political Economy and Business Studies at La Sapienza, Rome, and in Development Studies, including Gender and Development and Labour and Development, at SOAS. I joined SOAS as faculty in 2008, after completing a PhD on the ‘making’ of cheap labour in the Indian garment industry, with an emphasis on the labour regime characterising the industry, its global and localised patterns of labour control, and its productive and reproductive links to the informal economy. I continue my work on what I call ‘sweatshop economics’ to date. I also work on feminist political economy theories, methods and methodologies, on the relation between production and reproduction in shaping processes of value and labour surplus extraction, and on the global political economy of labour and work. In the last two years, I have worked extensively on the political economy of COVID-19, from a feminist lens centred on social reproduction and accounting for racial and gender inequalities. Based on my work, I have collaborated with international development organisations like the ILO and UNIDO and with INGOs like ActionAid, Labour Behind the Label, War on Want. I have engaged with global development research or education centres like UNU-WIDER and the Global Labour University (GLU). I have worked alongside unions, labour organisations and NGOs, like the Self-Employed Women Association (SEWA), Cividep and READ in India. I am currently lead technical advisor for the ILO-funded project ‘Industrial Relations in India’s Export Garment Industry: Mobilizations & Employment Law Cases from Bangalore, Gurgaon, Tiruppur’, which maps the social life of industrial disputes filed by workers and unions in the export centres. All disputes analysed during the project will be available for consultation in a repository at the Archive of Indian Labour at the V.V Giri National Labour Institute, New Delhi. |
|---|---|
| Research Interests | Global production networks and labour regimes, CSR and modern slavery, informal economy and precarious labour, social reproduction, labour feminisation, garment and textile sectors. |
| Teaching and Learning | At SOAS, I teach on theories of development, political economy, global supply chain capitalism and labour, on feminist political economy, and on contemporary India. I consider myself a global instructor dedicated to the teaching of social justice. I have given invited lectures and seminars across the world, including at the New School and Cornell (US); at JNU, AUD, Azim Premji University and the National Law School (India); at the universities of Turin and Padova, and Rome La Sapienza (Italy); and at the universities of Louvain and Ghent (Belgium). |
| PhD Supervision Availability | Yes |