Professors
Samentha GOETHALS
Assistant Professor
Droits Humains, Travailleurs immigrants, Refugiers, Responsabilité des entreprises pour les droits humains, Sensemaking, Framing analysis, Human rights education in business schools, structural injustice, sustainability due diligence, Sensemaking
Academy
GlobalizationResearch center
SKEMA Centre for Sustainability StudiesLocation
Sophia AntipolisDiscipline
Law & HumanitiesDr. Samentha Goethals is Assistant Professor in Business & Society at SKEMA Business School and Visiting Fellow at Copenhagen Business School, where she contributes to the FRONTIERS project on sustainability due diligence for a just transition. She holds a PhD in Politics from Oxford Brookes University and has developed an interdisciplinary research agenda that bridges socio-legal studies, global governance, and organizational theory—grounded in years of advocacy and field-based research with NGOs and human rights defenders in high-risk and transitional contexts, such as the mining sector in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Her on-going work focuses on corporate responsibility in situations of forced migration and labour exploitation, shaped by policy-oriented research in the garment industry in Turkey and Jordan, and the agri-food sector in Europe. This work has resulted in several publications, including the award-winning article ‘Migrant Workers’ ‘Rights-Talk’ in the British Hospitality Sector’ (Business and Human Rights Journal, 2019) and ‘Business and Human Rights as Sensemaking: A Multi-Level Framework for Organizational Translation’ (Business & Society, 2025). She is Book Review Editor and co-editor of the special issue on Business, Human Rights, and Just Transition in the Energy and Extractive Sectors in the Business and Human Rights Journal. She is also co-editor of the forthcoming volume Beyond Boundaries: Methodological Approaches in Business, Human Rights and the Environment (Springer), which brings together innovative empirical and methodological contributions to the field.
Her current research expands the scope of corporate human rights responsibility to examine how businesses engage with sustainability due diligence in the context of just transition. She is especially interested in participatory and inclusive approaches to research and governance, including the use of arts-based methodologies to engage affected communities and non-human stakeholders in shaping more accountable and equitable futures.
Samentha is also co-Director of the Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum, a global network of educators advancing the pedagogy of BHR. She brings her critical, practice-oriented perspective into the classroom and the field, designing and delivering Business and Human Rights education and training for students of law, politics, and management, MBAs ad DBAs, financiers, social auditors, trade unions, and human rights defenders across regions and sectors.