Inga Thiemann

Inga holds a PhD in Law from University College London. Her doctoral thesis critically examined criminal law responses to human trafficking and proposed an alternative paradigm rooted in labour law. Inga received the prestigious Modern Law Review Scholarship for her doctoral research.

She previously received a MA in International Peace and Security from King’s College London and a Diploma in Advanced International Studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Inga is Horst Siebert Memorial Fellow at SAIS Europe.

Prior to her appointment at Exeter, Inga was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Modern Slavery at St. Mary’s University London and a Teaching Fellow at University College London.

Research Interests

Inga’s research focuses on the intersection of criminal law, migration law, employment law and feminist theory. In this, her particular interests are feminised labour and labour exploitation, with a current research focus on the sex industry.

She is currently working on a feminist socio-legal project on sex workers’ preferred models of sex work regulation, which explores avenues of reconciling sex workers’ regulatory needs and preferences with existing legal concepts in employment and self-employment regulation. She intends to explore the possibility of an inclusive concept of labour law that accommodates the individualized working conditions of sex workers. In this her work hopes to center the voices of sex workers when thinking about labour law.

Select Outputs

I. K. Thiemann. “Understanding human trafficking into the sex industry as a migratory phenomenon.” in Handbook of Migration Crises, edited by I. Ness and M. Ruiz. Oxford University Press, 2019.

I. K. Thiemann. “Beyond victimhood and beyond employment? Exploring avenues for labour law to empower women trafficked into the sex industry.” Industrial Law Journal (2018).

I. K. Thiemann. “Villains and victims, but no workers – why a prosecution-focussed approach to human trafficking fails trafficked persons.” Anti-Trafficking Review 6 (2016): 126129.

Select Conference Appearances

“Unpacking the definition of ‘a victim of trafficking,’” Socio-Legal Studies Association Conference, University of Bristol, UK, 27-29 March 2018.

“Beyond victimhood and beyond employment? Exploring avenues for labour law to empower women trafficked into the sex industry,” Labour Law Research Network Conference, University of Toronto, Canada, 25-27 June 2017.

“The UK Modern Slavery Act and the UK counter-trafficking response – ‘ground-breaking’ or re-enforcing problematic stereotypes?” Oxford Socio-Legal Discussion Group, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (CSLS), University of Oxford Law School, Oxford, UK, 23 February 2017.

“Villains and victims, but no workers – considering the labour rights dimension of human trafficking,” United Nations 8th Session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, UN Vienna, Austria, 19-20 October 2016.

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