Dr Remi Edwards

Profile

I am a critical political economist working on struggles around labour rights and working conditions in agricultural supply chains. My work draws bring together theories of capital-labour relations, global value chains, racialisation and social reproduction to understand how and through which strategies workers and their allies resist agricultural exploitation. My Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship explores worker-consumer alliances in agricultural supply chains.

I received my ESRC-funded PhD in 2024 from the University of Sheffield. I have published coauthored pieces in New Political Economy and Global Society, among other academic works and non-academic reports and policy briefs. I previously hosted the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute’s podcast series New Thinking in Political Economy.

Research

Research Interests:

I completed my PhD research at the University of Sheffield in April 2024, which explored the processes of struggle through which workers’ shape private governance initiatives in the US tomato and Costa Rican banana industries. Drawing on global value chain and labour regime frameworks with a worker-centred, field-based methodology, the thesis argued that through such processes, workers can generate tangible gains though they are limited by contextual and structural factors. Drawing on data from this project, I have conducted subsequent research on the intersection of racialised labour with agricultural supply chains.

In April 2024, I began a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship exploring the relationship between workers and consumers in agricultural industries. Continuing work with research partners in Costa Rica and forging new relations with those in UK agriculture, the project investigates the power and potential of alliances between workers and consumers in shaping firm behaviour, embedding alliances within everyday experiences of labour and consumption.

Other ongoing projects explore the relationship between fragmentation and concentration in the global economy, and the role of bottom-up methods in reifying political and social ‘purpose’ in global political economy scholarship.

Centre and Group Membership

Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP)

Department of Business and Society

Publications

Selected Publications

Edwards, R. & Lang, J. (forthcoming, January 2027) ‘Managing Supply Chains for Social Justice’, Managing & Leading for Social Justice: a textbook. Bristol University Press.

Edwards, R. (2025) ‘Book review: Between HIV Prevention and LGBTI Rights: the political economy of queer activism in Ghana by Dr Ellie Gore’, Journal of Development Studies, OnlineFirst.

Edwards, R. (2025) Banana workers’ experience of ethical certification in Costa Rica. Sheffield: SPERI.

Brunner, J., Edwards, R., et al. (2021) Forced Labour Evidence Brief: Labour Share and Value Distribution. Sheffield: Sheffield, Stanford & Yale Universities.

Edwards, R., et al. (2019) Report of findings: Corporate Commitments to Living Wage in the Garment Industry. Sheffield: SPERI, University of Sheffield.

Journal articles

Gore, E., Stanley, L., LeBaron, G., Edwards, R. et al. (2022) ‘The Political Economy of the Weinstein Scandal’, Global Society, 37/1, pp. 93-113. 

LeBaron, G., Edwards, R., et al. (2021) ‘The Ineffectiveness of CSR: Understanding corporate commitments to living wages in the garment industry’, New Political Economy, 22/1, pp. 99-115.

Public Engagement

Media

I have conducted a variety of knowledge-exchange and impact projects with non-academic research partners. These include:

• Research consultancy with Oxfam and Banana Link assessing progress towards living wages in the banana industry, which fed into a policy briefing shared directly with European supermarkets and other stakeholders.
• A report of findings on living wage efforts in the garment industry with Clean Clothes Campaign and WSR Network which gained media attention from Reuters, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The Independent.
• A policy brief based on my PhD research exploring gaps in ethical certification in the banana industry, shared with corporate and other stakeholders in Berlin 2025 in collaboration with Oxfam, Banana Link and banana trade union representatives.
• Research briefs on drivers of forced labour in supply chains (including value distribution and financialisation) for Re:Structure Lab, including participation in stakeholder dissemination convenings.

Grants

UKRI ESRC 1+3 Doctoral funding

Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship