Natasha Iskander

Natasha N. Iskander, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service, conducts research on the relationship between migration and economic development. She looks at the ways that immigration and the movement of people across borders and institutions can provide the basis for the creation of new knowledge and new pathways for political change. She considers these dynamics as they pertain to economic production, governance, and political opportunity. Her award-wining book, entitled Creative State: Forty Years of Migration and Development Policy in Morocco and Mexico (Cornell University Press: 2010), examines the processes of innovation launched by migration in both countries, and looks at the way that immigrants worked with government to design policies that built a bridge link between labor emigration and local development. She has also explored how migration can support the development of knowledge considered tacit and situated– that is, knowledge that is impossible to codify and difficult to move across contexts. She has looked at Latinos in the US construction industry, examining how migrants considered unskilled can transpose and transform tacit knowledge, and can make vital contributions to industry performance. As an extension of this research concern, she has conducted wide-ranging research on transnational certification programs. At present, she is writing a book on migrant workers in Qatar, and the ways in which their ability to transpose and create knowledge is inflected by the contractual agreements – similar to bonded labor contracts – under which they labor.

Dr. Iskander’s research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Qatar National Research Foundation, and others. She has held positions as a fellow-in-residence at the Center for Advanced Studies of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the Global Research Institute at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Dr. Iskander received her PhD in Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She also holds a Masters in City Planning (MCP) from MIT, and a BA in Cultural Studies from Stanford University. In addition to her research, she engages in development work with partners ranging from the World Bank to small NGOs, internationally and in the United States, on issues of urban development, migration and development policy, and community health planning.