Isabelle Ferreras
Isabelle Ferreras is Research Director of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS-Fonds de la recherche scientifique), Professor extraordinaire at the University of Louvain (IACCHOS_CriDIS_TED).
Isabelle Ferreras is a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Oxford. She is also a Senior Research Associate of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School, where she teaches in the executive Trade Union Program.
Her Accelerator Fellowship will focus on worker voice as a key component of AI alignment and of meaningful work through stakeholder research, publications, high-level events and the development of a practical governance tool.
Isabelle Ferreras is a sociologist (PhD, UCLouvain) and political scientist (MSc, MIT). Her scholarship focuses on the meaning of work, corporate governance, and democratic theory at the critical intersection of planetary boundaries and the rapid deployment of artificial intelligence. Recognised for conceptualising the business firm as a political entity, she has been investigating the structural contradiction between capitalism and democracy through the lens of internal corporate organisation. Pioneering the concept of labour investors, her current research examines AI as a technology of government that further heightens the urgency of extending democracy into the workplace. Drawing from the history of democratic revolutions, and the study of industrial relations, she developped the framework of Economic Bicameralism, which vests labour investors with governing rights on par with capital investors, as an institutional pathway toward economic democracy.
In 2020, Ferreras co-authored with Julie Battilana and Dominique Méda the DemocratizingWork.org initiative, an op-ed signed by more than 6,000 scholars around the globe, establishing an international academic network focused on democratising firms, decommodifying labour, and decarbonising to remediate the planet. In 2025 and 2026, she was appointed Chair of the International High-Level Expert Committee on Democracy at Work by the Ministry of Labour and Vice-President of the Government of Spain. In February 2026, the Committee released a thorough plan to democratise firms as a critical pathway to address the contemporary polycrisis, in which AI is featured prominently (see the Report on Democracy at Work for more information).
Her many publications in English include Firms as Political Entities. Saving Democracy through Economic Bicameralism (Cambridge University Press, 2017), co-edited, Democratize Work. The Case for Reorganizing the Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2022), and Democratizing the Corporation (Verso, 2024).
Isabelle Ferreras is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Belgium (Class Technology & Society). In 2024, she was awarded a honorary degree by the Université Laval.
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Contact
- Email address: aiethicsafp@philosophy.ox.ac.uk