Ifeoma Ajunwa


Ifeoma Yvonne Ajunwa is a Nigerian American writer and professor of labor relations, law, and history at Cornell University.

Education

Ajunwa received her BA at University of California, Davis in 2003, her JD at University of San Francisco School of Law in 2007, and her MPhil and PhD in Sociology at Columbia University in 2012 and 2017, respectively. Ajunwa was a McNair Scholar as an undergraduate student, received an AAUW Selected Professions Fellowship in law school, and was a Paul F. Lazersfeld Fellow as a PhD student.
Ajunwa's PhD thesis was advised by Josh Whitford.

Career

Ajunwa is an associate professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and an associate faculty member at Cornell Law School.
She is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University,, where previously she was a Fellow from 2016-2017 and a Teaching Fellow at Harvard Law School,. She also served as a Microsoft Research NYC Research Intern in 2015.
Ajunwa's research interests are at the intersection of law and technology with a particular focus on  the ethical governance of workplace technologies, corporate governance, and health equity. Her research focus is also on diversity and inclusion in the labor market and the workplace.
She will publish a book - "The Quantified Worker" - with Cambridge University Press in 2021.
Ajunwa was awarded tenure by Cornell University on May 22nd, 2020. On February 5, 2020, Ajunwa testified at a U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor hearing on "The Future of Work: Protecting Workers' Civil Rights in the Digital Age". She discussed artificial intelligence-enabled racial bias in hiring practices and advocated for legislation protecting personal and genetic data privacy in the workplace.. On May 6th 2018, Ajunwa was a where she presented a talk on the Controversies of Ethics and Technology in the Modern Workplace.. At Cornell, Ajunwa has served as a board member on several advisory boards, including for the Institute for Africa Development and the Cornell Prison Education Program.

Awards and honors

Ajunwa's awards and honors include:
Ajunwa's scholarly writing includes:
For Law review:
  1. Automated Employment Discrimination, 34 Harv. J.L. & Tech. __.
  2. , 41 Cardozo. L. Rev. __.
  3. , 40 Berkeley J. Emp. & Lab. L.1.
  4. , 63 St. Louis U. L.J. 21.Ife
  5. , 112 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1385..
  6. , 105 Cal. L. Rev. 736 .
  7. , 51 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 75.
  8. , 83 Fordham L. Rev. 2999.
  9. , 75 Ohio St. L. J. 1225.
  10. , 17 U. PA. J. L. & Soc. Change 75.
For Peer Review and Other Publications:
  1. “Race, Labor, and the Future of Work,” Oxford Handbook of Race and Law in the United States, Eds. Devon Carbado, Emily Houh, and Khiara Bridges
  2. “The Black Box at Work” Special Issue of Big Data and Society, Eds. Frank Pasquale and Benedetta Brevini
  3. Briscoe F, Ajunwa I, Gaddis A, McCormick J PLOS ONE 15: e0229044. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0229044
  4. In Work and Labor in the Digital Age. Research in the Sociology of Work. Published online: 14 Jun 2019; 61-91.
  5. Ajunwa, I. & Caplan, R.. DNA Technology. SAGE Encyclopedia of Surveillance, Security and Privacy..
  6. , Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, 44 : 474-480.
Ajunwa's public media writing includes: