Rachel Phillips

Rachel Phillips is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. An economic and legal geographer, her work examines how law and other forms of state power shape the spaces of economic life. Her dissertation explores these issues through an intellectual and geographical history of the law and economics movement, a group of legal scholars and economists whose work has helped to transform the dominant paradigms of legal-economic thought in the United States since the postwar period.

Rachel holds a BA and MA from the University of Toronto. Before arriving at UBC, she worked with housing rights organizations in Toronto, developing campaigns to legally enshrine the human right to housing. Since starting her PhD, Rachel has continued to write on housing issues, alongside research on digital platforms, labor rights and exploitation, law, and the politics of infrastructure. Her work has been published in Antipode, the International Journal of Housing Policy, New Political Economy, and Sociologica.