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Professor Diamond Ashiagbor is a Senior Visiting Research Fellow from 23 September to 13 December 2024.
Diamond Ashiagbor is Professor of Law at the University of Kent, UK. She is an interdisciplinary legal scholar whose research and teaching spans labour law, equality, race and colonialism, regionalism (European Union and African Union), trade and development, and the economic sociology of law. Her most recent edited book was聽Re-imagining labour law for development: Informal work in the global North and South, Hart Publishing. She has previously been Professor of Law at SOAS University of London, Reader in Law at University College London, and has held visiting positions at Columbia Law School, Melbourne Law School, and Osgoode Hall. She is a member of the editorial board of聽European Law Open, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS). Diamond has been a winner of the Society of Legal Scholars Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship; and recipient of a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship; a US-EU Fulbright Research Award; and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. She is a Trustee of Black Cultural Archives,聽the UK鈥檚 only national heritage centre dedicated to collecting, preserving and celebrating the histories of African and Caribbean people in Britain; and a 鈥榝ixed term member鈥櫬爋f Matrix barristers chambers.
Reconceptualising Labour Law: Race, Legal Form and the Legacies of Colonialism
During her time at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Diamond will be working on a project entitled 鈥楻econceptualising Labour Law: Race, Legal Form and the Legacies of Colonialism鈥�, for which she was awarded a British Academy / Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship. Race and the legacies of colonialism are central to modern economic life and to working life, but are absent from labour law scholarship. Learning from the colonial past of work to understand its present, this project radically reconceptualises labour law, placing race at the centre of the labour contract. It identifies ways in which race, racism and the legacies of colonialism are implicated in the emergence of paid work, in the forms of law regulating transitions from slavery to indenture to 鈥榝ree鈥� labour, in the construction of the postwar welfare state, and in the law regulating modern labour markets.
The project will contribute to the interdisciplinary mission of IAS, in connecting social science-influenced legal scholarship (in particular, around labour, social rights, equality, governance and economic law) and historical and humanities-inflected legal scholarship.
