Clare joined the University of Birmingham as Assistant Professor in 2025 from the University of Kent where she worked as a lecturer following her ESRC-SeNSS postdoctoral research fellowship (2020-2022). During her postdoc, Clare published her first monograph, An Economic Sociology of Law Reimagined: Beyond Embeddedness (Routledge, 2022) along with multiple peer-reviewed articles and more creative projects. As a lecturer at Kent Law School, Clare convened and developed Public Law 2, a core module covering regulation and governance, transnational law, global governance and law and political economy. She also convened undergraduate dissertation modules, and taught on EU law and PGR methods modules. She has also published on legal design, and draws on ‘design mode’ in her work to visualise and graphically illustrate theoretical, analytical and conceptual innovations.

Prior to joining Kent Law School, Clare completed her PhD at SOAS, University of London, during which time she developed the insights from an Economic Sociology of Law that now inform her work on disability and social justice; notably her theory of Ability Capitalism. Before her PhD, Clare completed a Masters (LLM) in East Asian Laws at UCL and an LLB (Hons) at LSE.

Clare has been awarded funding from the ESRC, SLSA and University of Kent and is regularly invited to deliver keynotes, seminars and workshops on ability capitalism, disability justice and the economic life of the law. She draws not only on her lived experiences, but from the disability advocacy and activism with which she is engaged.

Clare is a trustee and board member of the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA), co-chairs the SLSA EDI committee and co-convenes the SLSA Disability Law and Social Justice conference stream. She is also a member of COST ELDA consortium (European Legal Design Action; European Cooperation in Science and Technology), as well as the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) and the Law and Society Association (LSA).

Clare’s research sits at the interface of law, economy and society; notably how we do, talk, and think about the relationships between the three fields and how these are leading us into financial crashes, social crises, and environmental catastrophes. She draws on diverse theoretical framings from sociology, economic sociology and political economy to critique the economic life of the law, using ‘designerly’ approaches to interrogate and prefigure pathways towards more equitable and inclusive futures.

Her first monograph, published in 2022 with Routledge, analysed the effects of talking about the law and economy as embedded in society, taking inspiration from the works of Weber, Polanyi, Cotterrell and Giddens to propose an alternative framing that understands the econo-socio-legal sphere as mutual re-co-constructed through interactions.

More recently, she has developed these insights in the light of her experiences of labour market inclusion and exclusion during The Great Prefiguration of the pandemic lockdowns to develop her original theory of ability capitalism; that is, the constitutive role of law in market constructions of disability.

Clare’s work also draws on visual and prefigurative, ‘designerly’ methods to make ‘visible and tangible’ the concepts and theories that underpin her work as well as the lived realities of disadvantage and oppression. In 2021 she created the Mountains of Metaphor, an interactive web-based online game visually charting her journey through the doctoral experience, and has published numerous blog posts and journal articles about the value of visualising.