Genevieve LeBaron is Professor and Director of the School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University and PI of ReStructure Lab. She serves on the UK Parliament’s Modern Slavery and the Supply Chain Advisory Group and the reference group for United Nations Delta 8.7. She was elected to the College of the Royal Society of Canada in 2020.
Genevieve’s field research has investigated business models of forced labour in agricultural, garment, construction, and retail supply chains across India, China, Ghana, the UK, and the US. She has analysed the effectiveness of government and industry efforts to combat forced labour, including through Fairtrade certification, ethical auditing, and home state regulation. She has published on these topics in leading academic journals and in four books published by Polity, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press.
In addition to her academic work, Genevieve writes regularly for the media and has had bylines in The Guardian, Salon, and openDemocracy. Her recent media appearances include CBC Ideas, Radio France, BBC, and Whose Century Is It?, and her research has been profiled in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Independent, The Guardian, and The Washington Post, amongst other outlets.
Her research has won a number of awards, including a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2021), a book prize and two best paper awards from the Academy of Management (2021, 2018), a UK ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellowship (2016), and a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award (2015). Her research has been funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund, British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and Ford Foundation, amongst others.
Genevieve has held visiting positions at leading Universities around the world, including Yale University, Sciences Po Paris, Osgoode Hall Law School, and the University of California, Berkeley. From 2015-2016, she held the Human Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery Fellowship at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition and then led the Yale University Modern Slavery Working Group based at the Center from 2016-2020. She has also been a research fellow at the International Labour Organisation in Geneva. She held positions at the University of Sheffield from 2013 to 2021 (including serving as Director of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) from 2018 - 2020), and prior to that, she was SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia’s Liu Institute for Global Issues.
Her teaching focuses on international political economy, international relations, business and society, corporate social responsibility, forced labour, human trafficking, and slavery in the economy, and feminist political economy and social reproduction. She has taught courses at Yale University, University of Sheffield, Simon Fraser University, and York University (Canada), located within and listed across departments of Political Science, International Affairs, Development Studies, Business and Management, and Labour Studies.
She has been included in the 2018 UK Top 100 Corporate Modern Slavery Influencers List (#15) and 2017 Global Top 100 Human Trafficking & Slavery Influencers List (#1 academic). She advises United Nations and national government agencies on preventing and eradicating forced labour, human trafficking, and slavery.
She served as an Editor of Review of International Political Economy from 2018-2021.
She is originally from Vancouver, Canada and enjoys rowing, hiking, cycling, and backcountry skiing.
