Inez Valdez’ research is on critical race and feminist theory, migration, transnationalism, empire, and racial capitalism. It has been supported by the Humboldt Stiftung, the Global Arts & Humanities Society of Fellows, the Princeton University Center for Human Values, and the Max Weber Programme.

Her work on migration explores the construction of punishing lived experiences through enforcement regimes of surveillance, detention and deportation; the role of secularism in obscuring critical practices of contestation of domination; the role of violence in underpinning and constituting law (also in the area of policing) and how big data transforms the realm of immigration enforcement and immigration politics as a whole (ongoing).

Her book Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft (2019) makes the case that cosmopolitanism must be transnational. This is because global injustice creates distinct local spaces of oppression that we can only make sense of by exploring their commonalities and origins in common global structures of domination.