Associate Professor- Law, Land, and Local Economies
Dr. Vasanthi Venkatesh is Associate Professor in Law, Land, and Local Economies at the University of Windsor, Faculty of Law. Her research focuses on law, resistance, and social movements; labour migration and citizenship; racialisation, colonialism and discrimination; and political economy of agriculture and technology. Her expertise lies in the interdisciplinary and comparative study of law within its political, economic, global, and historical contexts.
With Justicia for Migrant Workers in Ontario, she administers the Migrant Farmworkers Clinic at Windsor Law; this is the first legal clinic for migrant farm workers in Canada and is based on law and organising principles. She was appointed as a member of the Leadership Committee on Equitable Livelihoods in the UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) 2021 based on her expertise in migrant and labour rights of food system workers. She is the Chair of the Board of Directors of IAVGO, a workers compensation legal clinic that is oraganised as a collective. She has worked and continues to work with a variety of activist, grassroots, and human rights organizations globally and in Canada that mobilise against colonialism, capitalism, and casteism.
Dr. Venkatesh has a PhD from the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the University of California, Berkeley, where her dissertation used a comparative socio-legal approach with field-work to theorize how law functions to dispossess and produce unfree labour in the agricultural systems in Canada, Occupied Palestine, and other countries. The study also explored how law is mobilized by by migrant workers and their advocates as a tool of resistance. She is currently working on a book manuscript based on this research, which examines the ongoining legacies of the global plantation complex through racialized borders and agricultural legal exceptionalism. She also holds a JD from the University of Toronto, an MA in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and has an MS and a BS degree.
Her research is informed by critical class, race, and anti-colonial scholarship and uses empirical (qualitative and quantitative), comparative, and historical methods. Her articles have covered labour migration and indentureship, migrant and racial justice and anti-colonial movements, including the BDS movement and "fugitive" resistance, gender violence and global law reform in Africa and South Asia, coloniality of power and the Global South (including on citizenship laws in South Asia and the Dalit Radical Tradition), and agricultural political economy.She has received several grants for her research including from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Law Foundation of Ontario, and the US National Science Foundation (NSF).
Prior to pursuing her PhD, Vasanthi ran a sole legal practice and consultancy in Toronto specializing in refugee rights litigation with a focus on women and LGBTQ+ claimants and has also worked in a litigation firm.