Shikha Silliman Bhattacharjee

Dr. Shikha Silliman Bhattacharjee, ChainGE Lab Postdoctoral Fellow and Parasol Fellow, Head of Research, Policy and Innovation, Equidem

Shikha is a researcher, lawyer, and advocate. Her work focuses on migration, supply chains, climate justice, and gender, caste and race in the global economy, bringing together legal analysis, interdisciplinary social science research, and social theory. Shikha studies global value chains and migration corridors in order to inform legal and quasi-legal regimes at international, national, and sub-national levels. Her focus on gender, race, and caste in the global economy considers how social governance regimes articulate in relationship to legal, financial, and political regimes. 

Shikha's commitment to community movements for justice infuses her practice, scholarly work, and approach to teaching and collaboration. Her portfolio encompasses research and advocacy in collaboration with academic institutions, large global labour and human rights institutions like the International Labour Organization, Asia Floor Wage Alliance, Human Rights Watch, Global Labor Justice, and the Freedom Fund. It also includes collaborations with more than 30 grassroots partner organizations and coalitions concentrated in Asia and Africa. 

Shikha is a co-author of Reverse Subsidies in Global Monopsony Capitalism - Gender, Labour and Environmental Justice in Garment Value Chains (Cambridge University Press 2022). She has published papers in peer reviewed journals and law reviews, and more than twenty policy reports documenting labour rights conditions across sectors. Shikha holds a PhD from University of California Berkeley, a JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and a BA in English and Ethnicity, Race and Migration from Yale University. Her research has been well covered in the media, including by Al Jazeera, BBC News, CNN, Devex, The Guardian, Huffington Post, The Nation, The New York Times, Reuters, TIME, VICE, and Vogue Business. 

At ChainGE Lab, Shikha will focus on informality, labour rights exclusion, and workplace violence as particular areas for intervention in developing labour law for a new supply chain economy. 

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