Profile

Simone Buechler

• Postdoctoral Research Scholar
  Committee on Global Thought
  Columbia University

Simone Buechler was an assistant professor/faculty fellow in the Metropolitan Studies Program at New York University. She received a Ph.D. from the Urban Planning Department at Columbia University where she studied under Saskia Sassen and Peter Marcuse. Before earning her Ph.D. Dr. Buechler worked at the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), focusing on women and microcredit. She has also held positions at the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development, Women’s World Banking, and Appropriate Technology International. Her research interests include: labor market restructuring, the informal economy, globalization and cities, women and economic restructuring, Brazil, social movements, squatter settlements, and urban planning. She conducted extensive research on the impact of economic globalization on low-income women and urban labor markets in São Paulo, Brazil, interviewing low income women in three squatter settlements and low-income neighborhoods, as well as street vendors, sweatshop workers and owners, industrial managers, union activists, government officials at all levels – municipal and federal, NGO practitioners, scholars, and Wall Street bankers. At present she is focusing on a variety of questions such as: what is the “local” in a global neo-liberal era and has decentralization empowered or disempowered municipal governments, community associations and individual workers; who are the social actors who have been or could again influence the impacts of and direction of economic globalization; and how does one measure and conceptualize the informal sector that is very much tied to global economic change? She will begin new research on Brazilian immigrants to Newark, New Jersey with a focus on entrepreneurship, transnationalism and the impact of U.S. immigration policies.