Kurt W. Kuehne
Postdoctoral Associate
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: AB Princeton University; MA University of Wisconsin-Madison; PhD University of Wisconsin-Madison
Research Areas: International labor migration, Development, Knowledge economies, Global Cities, Asia and the Middle East
Kurt W. Kuehne is a Sociologist and Postdoctoral Associate at New York University Abu Dhabi. His book project, based on an award-winning dissertation, examines politics and policy around the temporary/cyclical labor migrants who build and maintain the world’s rising global cities. The project builds upon over 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork on South Asian construction workers and Southeast Asian domestic workers and has been supported by the US Departments of Education and State, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, and various research centers. A second major pipeline of research engages the employers of domestic workers to learn about their hiring motivations, managerial decision-making, and experiences employing outsiders in their own private home.
In collaboration with Anju Mary Paul and Bedoor AlShebli, he is also studying the migrations of non-native scientists to emergent research hubs in the Middle East and East Asia, exploring how the research landscape is shifting, and what this means for talent migration, global research competition, knowledge economies, and the development of science itself.
Kuehne has won several teaching awards and serves on the non-profit board of Princeton in Asia. He holds a PhD (Sociology) and MA (Southeast Asian Studies) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an AB (Politics, magna cum laude) from Princeton University.