Helena Gräf is a PhD student at the Faculty of Economics, Law and Social Sciences at the University of Erfurt in cooperation with the Berlin School of Economics and Law on the topic of “Green Industrial Policy in the EU: The State-Driven Transformation of the Battery Value Chain”.
As an associate member of the sub-project JRT02 who focuses on orders of property, her research analyses industrial and (foreign) economic policy reactions in Germany and the European Union in response to a changing competitive situation in the wake of the global expansion of Chinese companies. Previously, she was a pre-doctoral student at the Max Weber College for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies and worked as a research assistant at the HWR Berlin in the research project “Global Value Chains in Germany, India, and Brazil after COVID 19 - Beginning of a New Type of Globalization?”.
Helena Gräf completed the M.A. “Political Economy of European Integration” at the Berlin School of Economics and Law (HWR) as well as a study visit at the Universidad de Montevideo in Uruguay. In her DAAD-funded master's thesis, she analyzed the impact of the sustainability chapter on labor standards in the EU free trade agreement with Vietnam. She wrote this thesis while working at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) on the topic of trade agreements as well as public procurement as labor governance instruments in the context of global production networks.
Research Interests: International and Comparative Political Economy, Sustainability in Global Value Chains and Global Production Networks, Green Industrial Policy, European Economic Governance, Social-ecological transformation.
