pathway: Socio-Legal Studies

I completed my LLB and LLM in International and Comparative Law at Trinity College Dublin where I wrote my LLM thesis on the criminal liability of domestic abuse-induced suicide. This research was incredibly meaningful to me and inspired my choice to pursue a PhD in criminal law at the University of Bristol, focused on creating a new offence specifically designed to address domestic abuse-induced suicide. My research interests centre on gender and law, particularly through intersectional feminist perspectives. I’m also the founder of Misneach Advocacy, a non-profit working to prevent grooming and abuse through consent workshops and legal reform.

My research is about finding a balance between accelerating the consenting process for offshore renewable energy projects, driven by climate concerns, and preserving public participation rights in environmental impact assessment procedures. Given the crucial role of public participation in ensuring the democratic legitimacy of decisions and energy justice, I intend to explore methods for harmonizing streamlined procedures with stakeholder engagement. Drawing on my research background in examining regulatory structures to address and mitigate environmental concerns of wind energy development across different jurisdictions, I was guided to this topic to seek effective solutions facilitating both rapid development and meaningful public involvement.

My research will make the case for embedding Adivasi epistemologies to achieve climate justice in India. Adivasis are the indigenous communities of India that are dependent on forests and play a critical role in the protection of forests and biodiversity. My research will examine to what extent the existing structures of exploitation and dispossession of Adivasis from their land and forests are reproduced by climate laws and policies in India. My research will argue that climate justice in the Adivasi context can be legally and politically attained only when it is understood along with democratic forest governance

The object of this research is to take a comparative and feminist approach to analyse and understand the extent to which the laws criminalizing non-consensual pornography are sufficient to prevent the victimization of women through the use of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven nudifying tools.

The mass digitisation of cultural heritage is perceived as both beneficial and democratising due to improving public access through online collections. However, it poses various questions from the public’s inability to freely share and use digital objects to ownership of the information and rights to govern access. Moreover, the process of digitization itself must be questioned as a process which can reproduce inequitable systems of representation and control.

The research will investigate these questions through a human rights lens and provide the legal and practical background necessary to support new regulatory tools for more flexible, ethical and inclusive access.

In this research, I explore the synergies and tensions between Article 25 (right to health) of the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and mental health laws and policies in England, with specific focus on the lived experiences of Filipino migrant women as a case study. My research combines doctrinal and reform-oriented critical methods with qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions. The research design aims to capture the personal and subjective dimensions of Filipino migrant women’s experiences and how these are shaped by broader socio-legal factors. This potentially contributes to more nuanced perspectives that situate personal stories and the subjective dimensions of individual experiences within the social phenomena of law, which may assist future migrant health-related policy and legislation.

My research will explore the potential of human rights due diligence laws in Europe promote access to freedom of association and collective bargaining in global fashion supply chains. Its main focus will be on the of EU’s proposed Directive on corporate sustainability due diligence.

Taking a legal anthropology approach, I will be considering how the relationship between children who  are claiming asylum in their own right and those who represent them. This relationship will be viewed through the lens of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The position of children in the asylum system will also be compared to children in other legal proceedings in England and Wales, such as Family or Criminal proceedings.

My research explores the value that the legal concept of human dignity contributes to migrants’ human rights protection. This research uses comparative and empirical research methods to examine how
beneficial human dignity can be in a migration context and how dignity can be used by legal practitioners in the UK.

My research aims to explore sex work as potentially decent work and, through the lens of Marxist-feminist theory, to consider the possibilities and limitations of using labour law to achieve this. I place sex workers’ calls for labour rights in the context of a so-called ‘crisis’ of labour law, as an increasing body of non-standard workers labour outside the scope of the law’s protection. I suggest that the ILO’s Decent Work Agenda may offer an alternative to traditional labour law that has the power to improve sex workers’ material conditions. By learning from sex workers and activists through empirical research, I hope to consider the extent to which a Decent Sex Work framework could affect the changes that workers in the UK sex industry want to see, whilst engaging with the limitations imposed upon the legal form by the social context of gendered and racialised capitalism.