Ethnicity and Migration

This research group brings together a range of interests in these fields, incorporating work from political science, sociology, demography/human geography, and social statistics.

The core of the work is funded through the ESRC Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE), but also through a number of Hallsworth, British Academy, and ESRC Future Leaders Fellowships and associated funding, and research emerging from other funded activities.

Selected projects

The Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE)

The Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) is a four-year interdisciplinary programme of research concerned with understanding changing ethnic inequalities and identities. CoDE utilises a variety of research techniques and tools to ensure that the potential economic and social benefits of our research are realised. Our focus is on the changes within ethnic groups (their internal structures and formulations of identities) and their external relationships and position in British society.

The Social Complexities of Immigration and Diversity

The SCID project will integrate two very different disciplines, social science and complexity science, in order to gain a new understanding of the complex, social issues surrounding immigration. It will do this by building a series of computer simulation models of these social processes. One could think of these as serious versions of the Sims computer games, programmes that track the social interactions between many individuals. Such simulations allow ‘what if’ experiments to be performed so that a deeper understanding of the possible outcomes for society as a whole can be established based on the interactions of many individuals.

British Religion in Numbers

There is much public discussion of such issues as how secular Britain really is, how religiously diverse, whether people see political and religious identities as conflicting, and how polarised religious views actually are. Religious data is also important for public decision-making – by local authorities, central government and other public bodies. There is a great deal of historical and contemporary data available, but it has hitherto been scattered, or difficult to access by many researchers. BRIN aims to enable access to religious data, by researchers of all backgrounds.

Lead