Valerie Verdoodt
Contact info
Short Bio
Valerie Verdoodt is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of Ghent University, where she is a member of the research group Law and Technology. She is also a member of the Human Rights Centre. Her research focuses on the legal and fundamental rights questions originating from the development of new media and technology, in particular (but not exclusively) regarding the protection and participation of children online.
Her research project ‘Children’s rights and the monetisation of play’ focuses on children’s rights in the context of (new) forms of commercial exploitation online (e.g. commercialisation of play through datafication, gam(bl)ing, digital child labour). She also co-supervises the interdisciplinary Gam(e)(a)ble project, which studies the convergence of gaming and gambling.
Valerie is also a Visiting Lecturer on 'Children’s rights in the digital environment' at the Georg August University of Göttingen. From 2019-2021, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Law Department of the London School of Economics (LSE), where she co-taught 'Digital Rights', 'IT and the Law', 'Cyberlaw' and 'EU Law'. Prior to joining the LSE, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for IT and IP Law at KU Leuven and a lecturer in 'Electronic Contracts Law' on the IP and IT Law LLM at KU Leuven, Campus Brussels.
Valerie holds a joint PhD from KU Leuven and Ghent University. In her PhD thesis, ‘Children’s Rights and Advertising Literacy in the Digital Era', she focused on the role of children’s rights in regulating new advertising techniques. During this time, she also worked as a legal expert on children’s rights and digital advertising for the World Health Organisation and the Council of Europe. In November 2018, she was a Visiting Researcher at eLaw, the Center for Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University.
Valerie is also an assistant-editor of the Kluwer Encyclopaedia of Laws – Media Law, and a member of the Working Group on unhealthy food marketing and children of the Superior Health Council of Belgium. From 2016-2020, she was a member and Vice-Chair of the Strategic Advisory Committee for Media ("SARC Sectorraad Media"), the official advisory body of the Flemish Minister for Media.