Previously, Babineau served as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Virginia and Research Coordinator for IBI Consultants. She is proficient in qualitative and quantitative methods, including text analysis and data management. Her research interests include the political economy of globalization, Latin American affairs, democratization, human rights and migration. She is particularly interested in changing global agrifood supply chains and their effects on workers. Her dissertation, “Retaking Control? Sending States and the Regulation of Temporary Labor Migration,” traced the regulation of temporary labor migration programs in American agriculture.
Her work, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, has been published by Open Democracy, the Social Science Research Council, The Brookings Institution and Harvard Business Review, as well as academic journals. She has served as a research lead on multiple large federally funded projects studying migrant farm labor in the agricultural industry on four continents. Outside academia, she has extensive experience as a human-rights investigator in U.S. agriculture and as a foreign-policy researcher specializing in Latin American affairs.
Kathryn holds a PhD in Sociology and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Virginia, and an MPhil from the University of Oxford.