H.A.

Hailey Allen is a researcher, writer, and communications strategist based in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the founder of Hailey Allen Research, LLC, an independent research practice focused on labor, technology, culture, and the changing ways work and human data create economic value.

Her current research explores emerging questions around workers’ rights, artificial intelligence, sports betting and prediction markets, name, image and likeness (NIL) rights, and athlete compensation. Across these areas, she is interested in a simple question: When human identity, work, or behavior becomes commercially valuable, who benefits—and what rights do the people creating that value retain?

Hailey began her career as a student reporter for The Crimson White, covering the aftermath of the April 2011 tornado super outbreak in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. That experience shaped her understanding of storytelling as both public record-keeping and social repair: a way for communities to preserve continuity, meaning, and shared understanding during periods of change.

Since then, Hailey has worked across local journalism, university communications, international humanitarian organizations, and labor campaigns throughout the American South. Her work combines research and storytelling to make complex issues understandable, identify the people and systems behind them, and produce information that communities and organizations can use.