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Kathryn Babineau
Kathryn Babineau is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia. She studies international political economy, labor rights, temporary migration, and public and private regulation. Her dissertation, “Regulating Labor Supply Chains: Sending States, Private Control, and the Governance of Temporary Labor Migration,” studied the regulation of temporary labor migration programs in US agriculture, with an emphasis on the changing role of sending states and private organizations in shaping the structure of these programs. To support this work, she received funding from the National Science Foundation and was selected as the Jefferson Scholars’ Foundation Groundbreakers Fellow. As a postdoctoral researcher, she works on an interdisciplinary research team at UVA studying the changing landscape of labor in the US agricultural industry. More specifically, she studies the implications of US farmers’ increasing reliance on temporary labor migration to support their labor needs, and the corresponding effects on worker recruitment, migration trajectories, and labor conditions on US farms. Kathryn holds a Master of Philosophy in Latin American studies from the University of Oxford and a Master of Public Policy and PhD in Sociology from the University of Virginia. Her research has been supported by the US Department of Labor and the US Department of Agriculture. Her work has been published by numerous academic and policy publications, including Harvard Business Review, the Brookings Institution, the Social Science Research Council, the International Institute of Strategic Studies, and Geography Research Forum. Before returning to academia, she worked as a human rights investigator in US agriculture and as a foreign policy researcher.
Kathryn will continue her dissertation work studying the role of temporary labor migration in global value chains, with a specific focus on the role that private regulators (including social certification programs) play in the regulation of temporary labor migration and labor conditions in global agricultural workplaces.