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Research Interests & Work in Progress

  • I am an urban geographer whose research lies at the intersections of urbanization and labour migration. Two broad areas of interest currently drive my research:

    • Migrant construction work and theories of urbanization

    I’m currently exploring the contemporary role that migrant construction workers play in building cities. Over the past two decades, precarious forms of temporary, foreign labour have become an increasingly prevalent feature of the construction sector in a range of cities across the Global ‘North’ and ‘South’. Drawing on approaches from postcolonial urban scholarship, feminist labour geography and critical urban theory, I have sought to highlight the ways that gender, ethno-nationality, class and citizenship are mobilized and produced through the incorporation of migrant workers in the urbanization process, and to foreground the prevalence of economic insecurity and exploitation among migrants employed in the construction trades. From a postcolonial perspective, I’m exploring how the construction process is a fruitful site through which to ‘internationalize’ urban theory; to that end, I’m currently developing a comparative research project that will explore urbanization through the lens of migrant construction work and employment in different cities.   

    • The urbanization of capital in Gulf Cooperation Council economies

    A second area of interest has been the political economic restructuring currently taking place in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) States. In a time where processes of neoliberalization, regional economic integration and ‘post-oil’ strategies of economic diversification have been unfolding across the region, I have been interested in the ways that efforts to re-engineer Gulf economies have involved the increasing use of urban built environments and their attendant components – particularly urban mega-projects, construction markets and circuits of urban development finance – to institute these agendas. I have sought to map some of these new capital-urban relationships, and to consider the socio-political implications for migrant construction workers as Gulf cities establish a host of new ties to the global economy.

Teaching Interests & Responsibilities

  • GGRB05 Urban Geography
  • GGRC40/CITC40 Megacities and Global Urbanization
  • GGRC45 Local Geographies of Globalization
  • GGRC13 Urban Political Geography

Affiliations

  • Research Associate, Cities Centre
  • Member, Association of American Geographers
  • Fellow, Royal Geographical Society (RGS)
  • Member, RGS Geographies of Justice Working Group

Publications

Buckley, M. (forthcoming) “Interrogating the ‘Bachelor’ Builder: Gender, Class and the Intersectional Politics of Urbanization in Dubai.” In A. Hanieh, A. Khalaf and O. El Shehabi (Eds.) Migration to the Gulf. London: I.B.Tauris.

    Buckley, M. and A. Hanieh (forthcoming) 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.

Buckley, M. (2009) The Evolving Arab City, Yasser Elsheshtawy (Ed.) International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33(4):1087-1088.