Opeyemi Akanbi Receives Jefferson Scholars Foundation National Fellowship

The Jefferson Scholars Foundation has named doctoral candidate Opeyemi Akanbi one of its 2018-19 National Fellows. She will receive its Ambrose Monell Foundation National Fellowship in Technology and Democracy.

The National Fellowship Program supports outstanding scholars at top institutions across the country who are completing dissertations in American history, politics, public policy and foreign relations.

The stipend of $25,000 supports one year of dissertation research and writing. The program also pairs each fellow with a renowned senior scholar in his or her field to serve as a mentor and help enhance his or her research project. The fellows also participate in fall and spring conferences at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, and receives training on how to reach broader audiences.

In particular, the Ambrose Monell Foundation Fellowship supports the completion of exceptional dissertations in the areas of technology and democracy.

Akanbi’s dissertation project, “Bounding Work: Time, Technology and Labor Regulation”, is situated at the intersection of labor history, media studies and law. It uses accounts of labor’s fraught history with technology in the industrial age as a framework for analyzing the construction and regulation of work boundaries in the information age. The project identifies the dichotomy between work and non-work as central to the development of labor regulation in the 20th century then proceeds to trace how the shift to cloud based workspaces has contributed to de-emphasizing the separation between work and non-work, both in temporal and spatial dimensions. Through critical analysis of the concept of time in labor history, the project shows how this theme has evolved over decades of change in enterprise technologies. It identifies the prevailing interests in the current integrated nature of work and non-work, while arguing for the adaptation of labor policies to current realities of work.

Akanbi is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Benjamin Cardozo School of Law and is a member of the New York bar. She has been a fellow with the Consortium on Media Policy Studies (COMPASS) and a guest scholar at the Aspen Institute Conference on Communications Policy.

In November, she was named one of two winners in the Yale Law Journal’s Student and Recent Graduate Essay Competition.