Natalie Sedacca successfully defends PhD on domestic workers and human rights

On 9 July 2021 Natalie Sedacca successfully defended her PhD thesis, ‘Domestic Labour and Human Rights: Challenging the Exclusion of Domestic Workers.’ The thesis analyses the legal position of domestic workers and their frequent exclusion from protective labour law legislation and criticises this exclusion on the basis of human rights standards.

The examiners, Professor Tonia Novitz (University of Bristol) and Professor Colm O’Cinneide (UCL), determined that the PhD should be awarded without corrections. They praised the thesis for its combination of doctrinal analysis and socio-legal data, its contextual understanding and critique of the situation of domestic workers in the UK and Chile, the use of qualitative interviews to give voice to the concerns of workers and those who represent them, and the case for reform it made based on those findings.

Natalie completed her PhD under the supervision of Professor Virginia Mantouvalou at the UCL Faculty of Laws. Her second supervisor was Dr Par Engstrom (UCL Institute of the Americas). Her funders were the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (AHRC) and the UCL Faculty of Laws.