Head of School awarded prestigious Visiting Fellowship at leading US University

University News Last updated 14 March 2023

Professor Harris Beider, Head of School for Social Sciences at Birmingham City University (BCU) has recently been awarded an Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Centre.

School of Social Sciences

Birmingham City University

The Graduate Centre, home to the global centre of research excellence at CUNY, each year awards 10 individuals around the world with Visiting Fellowships, each carrying great esteem amongst scholars from around the world.

Commencing in spring 2024, Professor Beider’s Visiting Fellowship will include a travel allowance, an office at the Graduate Centre as well as the exciting opportunity to join CUNY’s prestigious academic community.

Exploring America’s ‘left behind’ communities

As part of the Fellowship, Professor Beider will be working on a research project – ‘Recognizing Loss and Building Hope in Left Behind Places in New York City: A Case Study of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn’ - during his time in New York City.

My project focuses on recognising loss and rebuilding hope in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn in the context of the 2024 Presidential Elections, building on the networks that I developed in the neighbourhood during the writing of my 2020 book ‘Other America’.

Whilst neighbourhoods in Bay Ridge area have changed significantly in recent years due to demographic shifts and gentrification, there are still feelings of disconnection and displacement amongst communities.

Bay Ridge could be viewed as being ‘left behind’ spatially, politically and economically from the rest of the city with experiences of both loss and hope.

This has been played out at the local and national level through the different narratives of the Obama and Trump administrations, the devastation of the Covid pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the widespread BLM protests and continuing economic insecurity.

This project will engage with stakeholders including activists, businesses and academics partnering with non-profit organisations and training Bay Ridge residents to be community researchers to recognise the impact of loss and how to go about building hope.

The Visiting Fellowship will require Professor Beider to generate funding to support the research, which could eventually be used to help shape policy and practice in Bay Ridge and similar places across NYC and the country.

All research conducted by the BCU School of Social Sciences and its associated research centres aim to make an original contribution to knowledge and create real-world impact across the themes of sociology, psychology and criminology.

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