Michelle Buckley

Michelle is an urban and economic geographer whose research lies at the intersections of real estate, work and employment, and labour migration. Her 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.