Anibel Ferus-Comelo is a faculty member at the Goldman School of Public Policy and director of Community Engaged Academic Initiatives at the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley. She has more than two decades of experience in community-engaged research and teaching, with a focus on the governance of global supply chains, labor standards and corporate social responsibility, gender, migration and the political economy of India. 

Ferus-Comelo began her academic career at the University of California, Los Angeles, in labor and workplace studies and Asian American studies. Since then she has continued to teach classes in international development, global labor studies, gender studies and the sociology of India, and is affiliated faculty of the Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley. 

She has trained labor leaders through the Organizing Academy of the British Trades Union Congress and independent unions in India. Through scholarship and advocacy, she has supported the rights of low-wage, migrant workers in the U.S., the U.K. and India within unions and community-based workers’ centers, and has been a consultant researcher and policy analyst for international agencies, including the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. 

Ferus-Comelo co-edited Globalization, Knowledge and Labor (2009), an anthology of case studies that highlight labor organizing and collective knowledge in working class social movements. Her chapter on the labor movement in India is in press as part of The Cambridge Handbook of Labor and Democracy.. 

She earned a Ph.D. in economic geography from Queen Mary University of London, and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology.

Courtesy of Anibel Ferus-Comelo

Pronouns: She/her

Expertise: Organized labor, international development, India, Asian American studies, public policy, gender, migration, unions, low-wage workers, global labor

Location: Berkeley, Calif.

Email: anibel@berkeley.edu 

Phone number: (510) 642-9795

Heard on Deutsche Welle: “Modern slavery in India’s textile industry”