In the context of emboldened racial nationalism around the world, Ben co-authored an article with Moushumi Bhowmik about the role of music in building transnational solidarity in the fight against all forms of racism. Maybe this solidarity will help push back when states make some people out to be less human than others. Maybe it will help us to come together in the face of existential crises. 

Listen here to Ben speaking about this article, adding further examples of internationalist and anti-imperialist strands in radical Yiddish poetry and music and their uses in contemporary coalitional activism. Read Ben's 2024 piece for the Critical Legal Thinking blog on 'Yiddish songs of struggle and resistance: resources for our times?', part of short series on 'Workers against imperialism: resistance in Palestine, Britain and beyond' including pieces by Ihab Maharmeh, Darcy Leigh and Bal Sokhi-Bulley. Ben takes these themes further in a forthcoming article, co-authored with Isabel Frey. 

Between November 2024 and August 2025 Ben carried out twenty in-depth interviews with Samuel Solomon as part of a collaborative research project called 'Facing the trouble: cultural workers in Yiddishland, political Zionism, and the movement for Palestinian liberation'. In January 2026 Ben and Samuel presented on this research as part of 'Jewish and Yiddish reactions to the destruction of Gaza: a Panel', a webinar organised by Ben and Annabel Gottfried Cohen in collaboration with Lark & Bloom LIbrary. A recording of the webinar is available here.

Ben's 2024 book 'Brighton bound: stories of moving to, around and out of the city, 1920s-2020s', co-authored with Cath Senker and Amy Clarke was described in a review as 'an exceptional book which should open the minds of oral historians' (Oral HIstory Journal, October 2025). The book is available for £12 from QueenSpark Books here. The book emerged from collective work carried out by Ben, Cath and Amy in the Hopeful Solidarities project. See also their co-authored 2024 article in Area 'Hope as a practice in the face of existential crises: resident-activist research within and beyond the academy' and their 2026 piece in Social & Cultural Geography 'Connectedness and collectiveness amid islands of hope and trouble'.

Ben's co-authored paper with Hannah Schling was prompted by Beverley Mullings' question: ‘What does attention to
the racial character of capitalism, the tyranny of free market logics, and our vulnerability as humans on an ailing planet mean for the future study of labour geographies?’. The piece was published as a chapter in the Handbook of Labour Geography (Edward Elgar, 2025) entitled 'Labouring geography in a global pandemic: social reproduction, racial capitalism and world-making praxis'. Please email Ben if you do not have access to the handbook and would like a pdf copy of the chapter. Alternatively, an earlier version of the paper is available online here.

Taking issue with a cultural politics of white victimhood in the UK that identifies a powerful 'new elite' among university graduates, Ben - in a 2024 Commentary in the journal Current Anthropology - draws attention to several recent works mainly produced by writers outside universities which insist that the struggle against institutionalized and other forms of structural racism cannot be separated from the need to address both the legacies of colonialism and the class inequalities produced by contemporary racialised capitalism. See the commentaries by Ben and others at the end of Insa Koch's article 'From criminals to slaves: "modern slavery", drug trafficking, and the cultural politics of victimhood in postcolonial Britain'.  

Read Sivamohan Valluvan's review essay on Ben's 2020 book Stories from a Migrant City: Living and Working Together in the Shadow of Brexit in the Spring 2022 edition of Soundings magazine here  Alternatively the essay is available without a paywall via this thread on Twitter/X. 

Stories from a Migrant City is available at a fifty per cent discount (ten pounds plus postage) using promotional code Stories50 here. 

Ben's article 'Worldmaking in Peterborough' is part of Novara Media's October 2021 Focus on Breaking Britain. It explores how battles over England are rooted in place with non-elite cosmopolitanism alive and kicking. 

Extracts from reviews of Stories from a Migrant City:

'an exemplary instance of research that does not seek to rescue from messy difference (ethnic and racial) a pristine sameness (class); but, instead, seeks to rescue for sameness (class) a sharp grasp of difference, empathetically, solidaristically and altruistically perceived.' (Sivamohan Valluvan, Soundings)

[I]nformative and compelling... The thing that makes the book sing is [Rogaly's] work to point out painstakingly and carefully that non-elite cosmopolitanism exists... in Peterborough and must be understood as just as central to the identity of the city as stories of racism and exclusion... This book is for anyone interested in British identity.' (Charlotte Lydia Riley, New Humanist)

'The use of interview data and field notes is exemplary throughout. Credit must also go to Manchester University Press for publishing a research monograph on Peterborough when many publishers only consider taking on single city books when they focus on a select few global cities...Rogaly’s book eschews a romantic view of [urbanisation] but suggests that amidst the antagonism, hard work and creativity that characterises contemporary Peterborough there can still be found the basis of a common humanity, a radical form of (provincial) urban citizenship.... [F]ascinating... In understanding culture as productive and entering into circulation Rogaly understands long and short term residents of Peterborough not through inherited (dominant) meanings such as ‘migrant’ or ‘non-migrant’ but as city-makers' (Gareth Millington, City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action)

Listen to Ben in conversation about Stories from a Migrant City and Luke de Noronha's book Deporting Black Britons with Luke de Noronha and Javiela Evangelista in May 2021. Event hosted by City University of New York's Centre on Place, Culture and Politics in collaboration with the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialization at University College London.

Listen to Ben reading from Stories from a Migrant City in April 2020, and his introduction to the book's themes in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown (followed by Q and A).

Read Ben's July 2020 article in Discover Society reflecting on the possibilities of working-class unity and a sense of common humanity. 

Read the July 2020 Antipode Book Review Symposium (edited by Madhumita Dutta) with reviews of 'Stories from a Migrant City' by Darius Scott, Geraldine Pratt, Ilse van Liempt, Kendra Strauss and Michelle Buckley, followed by a response by Ben. 

Read Ben's May 2020 blog 'Key workers' stories of exploitation and resistance'. 

Listen to Ben's professorial inaugural lecture given at Sussex in May 2018, "'Food-work city': Oral histories of and for changing places." 

Read Ben's chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Place based on his inaugural lecture and entitled 'Food-Work city': oral history and the contested politics of place'. 

Read Ben's Commentary on 'Agricultural racial capitalism and rural migrant workers' published in June 2021  and the rest of the Special Issue on 'Agricultural regimes and migrant labour' he co-edited with Russell King, Aija Lulle and Emilia Melossi for the Journal of Rural Studies 

Watch the film Workers researched and co-produced by Ben with Director Jay Gearing as part of the Creative Interruptions Project. Watch the trailer for the film.

Read Jay and Ben's blog about the film for The Sociological Review.

Listen to Surviving Society podcast's interview with Ben in December 2018. 

Read Ben's August 2015 article in Society and Space in which he questions the way discussions of migration and mobility have commonly been framed, arguing for greater attention to the role of structural inequalities in shaping both mobility and fixity. 

Read Ben's short November 2016 piece 'Contesting neoliberal common sense: bottom-up history and the struggle over urban space' published in artist Jessie Brennan's book on Peterborough's Green Backyard.