The advisory team is comprised of both internationally renowned academics, who are researching on military labour, ethics and global labour chains and migration flows, and highly experienced practitioners and business leaders involved in the management and everyday operations/advocacy of labourers and their families.
Dr. Alex Hughes is an economic geographer and Reader at Newcastle University. Her main research interests lie in cultural political economy; postcolonial economies; global value chains and production networks; knowledge and economy; rethinking economy; transnational retailers and corporate responsibility; retailer-supplier relationships in the UK and USA; ethical trade and labour in Kenya, South Africa and Pakistan; regulation and governance; corporate social responsibility and sustainability; the audit economy; learning networks; ethical public procurement; ethical consumption in the global South; qualitative research methods.
Prof. Rachel Woodward is a professor in human geography and lectures at Newcastle University. Prof. Woodward’s research and teaching interests lie in military geographies, including military land use, military landscapes and post-military landscapes, military environmentalism, militarism and space/place, base conversion issues. She is also concerned with gender and identity, including military identities and gender and the armed forces, military representation in photography and print media, and contemporary military memoirs, reserve armed forces and University Service Unit.
Dr. Wen Lin is a human geographer and lecturer at Newcastle University. Her research and teaching interests include geographic information science (GIS) and urban geography. Dr. Lin’s research agenda centres on the intersection between the development and usage of geospatial technologies and the social and political conditions in which these practices are situated. She utilizes combined frameworks from critical GIS research and urban/political geography to investigate processes of geospatial technology constructions within a variety of urban contexts, and theorize their socio-political implications for citizen participation and urban governance. Meanwhile, Dr. Lin is interested in employing quantitative methods including GIS technologies to examine a wide range of social and environmental issues. She is also committed to facilitating strong relationships among community groups, local government agencies, and universities in her work, to foster community participation and development
Prof. Ray Jureidini is a Professor of Migration, Human Rights and Ethics at Research Centre for Islamic Legislation and Ethics (CILE). He has contributed world leading research for both academia and policy makers. In 2012-13 he served one year as consultant to the Migrant Worker Welfare Initiative at the Qatar Foundation in Doha, contributing to the QF Standards for Migrant Worker Welfare for contractors and sub-contractors and completing a report on labor recruitment to Qatar. He continues to work on labour rights for migrant workers through the Gulf States.
Dr. Zahra Babar is the Associate Director for Research at the Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar. Previously, she has served with the International Labor Organization and the United Nations Development Program. Her current research interests include rural development, Persian Gulf migration and labor policies, citizenship in the Persian Gulf states, and GCC regional integration.
Mustafa Qadri is an internationally renowned advocate for ethical recruitment and management of migrant workers in the Gulf States. He has researched and published numerous reports on labourer and labour chain practices in the Gulf States and on human rights in the context of conflict and security in South Asia. He has written for both the guardian and the independent on human rights abuses in migrant labour practices. He is also very active on twitter.
Tristan Forster is owner and director of FSI Worldwide, a global recruitment and labour management company who is pioneering ethical practices throughout their labour chains. Tristan has become a world leader within the business and government sectors on how to incorporate ethical practices into the everyday operations of labour chains. A short interview clip with Tristan talking about the problems with bonded labour practices can be found here.
Bassam Al Tahtamouni is the regional director of operations within the Middle East and North Africa for Global Staffing Solutions (GSS). GSS is a leading international recruitment company whose foundations are built upon ethical management practices. Bassam brings to the company, and to this research project, a wealth of on the ground experience working with and managing migrant labour in the Gulf region.
Angela Sherwood is a Migrants’ Rights Researcher for Amnesty International, specializing in labour recruitment and the protection of Nepali migrant workers in global supply chains. Over the past decade, Angela has assumed various positions related to migration research and policy development in the countries of East Timor, South Africa, Haiti, Mongolia, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, and the Philippines. She has also worked at the headquarters of the International Organization for Migration contributing to the development of global migration policy frameworks and international standards. Alongside her current position, Angela Sherwood is a doctoral researcher at International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at the Queen Mary University of London School of Law. Her research critically examines migration/displacement categories and their roles in urban land exclusion and the criminalization of urban squatters. Angela’s research and academic publications also cover themes related to disaster capitalism; border criminologies and the geopolitics of migration control; and the political economy of forced evictions and urban mobility.
Hanna Ketola has recently come on board as the project’s research associate. Hanna recently completed her PhD at King’s College London. Her research explores the politics of women’s agency in the context of peacebuilding in Nepal. In this research, Hanna foregrounds narratives of women who fought in the Maoist army and women who are engaged in the victims’ movement in the post-conflict context. She is interested in exploring how expressions of political agency are located, and her work rethinks conceptions of ‘subaltern’ and ‘local’ agency within the critical peacebuilding literature and feminist security studies. Hanna’s broader research interests are feminist international relations, feminist theories of agency and embodiment, gender and peacebuilding, postcolonial theory, subaltern politics and ethnographic methods within international relations. Prior to Hanna’s PhD, she worked in Nepal in a child rights NGO. She currently lives in London with her partner and their very energetic 3 year old son.