Michelle Buckley

My interests are broadly focused on the geographies of contemporary work and employment in cities, and in particular, the building work that sustains real estate development and investment in Canada and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. This work has examined the experiences of precariously-employed workers in the construction trades, and explores the politics of gender, citizenship, caste and race that sustain and mediate contemporary urbanization and real estate development. I am interested in supervising students with research interests in transnational work and employment in the GCC or Canada, the geo-histories of work and employment in particular locales, or new frontiers of working arrangements in cities.

Selected Publications 

Buckley, M., Chakravartty, P. & Gill, S. (2022) From indenture to ‘good governance’: eMigrate and the politics of reforming global labour supply chains. Antipode (early view)

Buckley, M. and Brauen, G. (2022) Building space, building value: Home renovations, space additions and the transformation of low-rise housing in Toronto. Urban Geography. (early view)

Buckley, M. (2020) Mapping wage theft in the informal economy: employment standards violations in the Greater Toronto Area. Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations 73(5): 502-525.

Buckley, M. (2018) Between house and home: renovations labor and the production of residential value. Economic Geography 95:3, 209-230.

Buckley, M. S. McPhee, and B. Rogaly (2017) Guest editorial: Labour geographies on the move: Migration, migrant status and work in the 21st century. Geoforum (78): 153-158.

Buckley, M and K. Strauss (2016) In, against and beyond Lefebvre: planetary urbanization and epistemic plurality. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 34(4): 617-636.

Buckley, M. (2014) On the work of urbanization: migration, construction labor and the commodity moment. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 104(2): 338-347.

Buckley, M. and A. Hanieh (2014) Diversification by urbanization: tracing the property-finance nexus in Dubai and the Gulf. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

Buckley, M. (2013) Locating neoliberalism in Dubai: migrant workers and class struggle in the autocratic city. Antipode 45(2): 256–274.

Buckley, M. (2012) From Kerala to Dubai and back again: migrant construction workers and the global economic crisis. Geoforum 43(2): 250-9.