May Al-Dabbagh

Associate Professor of Social Research and Public Policy Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BA Harvard University; PhD University of Oxford

Research Websites: Haraka: Experimental Lab for Arab Art and Social Thought Arab Center for the Study of Art

Research Areas: Gender, Globalization, Gulf, Migration, Organizations, Geopolitics of Knowledge Production, Global South(s), Self Tracing.


May Al-Dabbagh is an associate professor at New York University Abu Dhabi. She conducts research on gender and work in the Gulf using a combination of social psychology, public policy, and post-colonial feminist lenses. She has published in Organization Science, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and Idafat: Arab Journal of Sociology (in Arabic). She has received fellowships from the Center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), The Women and Public Policy Program (Harvard), and The Global Institute for Advanced Study and Tisch School of the Arts (NYU).

Her current book project is on global cities and the way in which professional women make home and work in the context of serial migration. She also has a project on the geopolitics of knowledge production and developed a method called Self Tracing which uses dialogical exchange and critical pedagogy to theorize intersectionality in the global south. Finally, she has art collaborations that bridge the social sciences and the arts, including: Making Space, Moving Bodies/Theorizing up, and Voice (re) Claimed.

Courses Taught