Michelle Buckley

Teaching Responsibilities

• GGRA03 Cities and Environments
• GGRC13 Urban Political Geography
• GGRD25 Work and Employment in the GTA
• GR1110 Geographic Thought and Practice

Research Interests

I am an urban and economic geographer whose research lies at the intersections of real estate, work and employment, and labour migration. My research is broadly focused on the ‘before’ and ‘after’ markets of real estate - in particular, the construction, maintenance and renovation of residential property. This research has primarily focused on two strands of inquiry. The first is research that has mapped the longstanding networks and institutional channels governing construction labour migration from India to cities across the Gulf Cooperation Council. The second has examined the circuits of precarious, non-citizen labour and value connected to the home construction and renovation industries in Toronto. Informed by perspectives from postcolonial scholarship, feminist political economy and critical urban theory, this research is informed by feminist framings of the home as a laboured space-economy, and as a site of capital accumulation wrought through, and productive of, hierarchies relating to gender, race, class, caste and citizenship.

Selected Awards and Grants

2021-2023     SSHRC Connections Grant ‘Mapping housing    insecurity: creating public digital mapping tools to preserve affordable rentals in Toronto’ (Co-PI with Drs. Glenn Brauen, Nemoy Lewis, Martine August and Julie Mah)

2019               Teaching Enhancement Grant ‘GIS and the City of Toronto’s Open Data Portal on building permits’ (with Dr. Glenn Brauen)

2018-2022     SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, Tracing the Livelihoods of Urbanization: Household Wealth and Construction Migration from Uttar Pradesh (with co-PI Dr. Paula Chakravartty, NYU)

2015              International Labour Organization Research Grant, ‘Migrant Labour in Construction’

2015-2017     Connaught New Researcher Award

2013-2015     SSHRC Insight Development Grant, ‘Urbanization from Below: Migrant Construction work in Toronto and London’ 

Publications

Journal articles

• 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. (2018) Labour and the city: notes across theory and research. Geography Compass 12(10).
• 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.

Book chapters

• Ip, P.T-T.I. and M. Buckley (2020) “‘Instant’ Cities? Rapid Urbanization and Spectacular Urbanisms”., in Bain, A. and L. Peake (eds.) Urbanization in a Global Context: A Canadian Readers’ Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Buckley, M. and Reid-Musson, E (2017) ‘Urbanization as a bordering practice”, in Jonas, A., K. Ward, B. Miller and D. Wilson (eds) Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics. Routledge.
• Buckley, M. (2017) “Migrant Labor” in N. Castree, M. Goodchild, W. Liu, A. Kobayashi, R. Marston, and  D. Richardson (eds), The Wiley-AAG International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology.
• Buckley, M. (2015) “Construction Work, ‘Bachelor’ Builders and the Intersectional Politics of Urbanization in Dubai.” In A. Hanieh, A. Khalaf and O. El Shehabi (Eds.) Transit States: Labour, Migration & Citizenship in the Gulf. London: Pluto Press. Pp.132-152.

Commissioned reports

• Buckley, M., A. Zendel, J. Biggar, L. Frederikson & J. Wells (2016) Migrant Work & Employment in the Construction Sector. International Labour Organization, Geneva.