Ben is engaged in three research and writing projects. One, in collaboration with Moushumi Bhowmik, explores the potential for transnational solidarity through music. An online You Tube video from an exploratory talk given about this work at Oxford Brookes University its inception in 2020 is available here. The second project 'Hopeful solidarities' is a collaboration with Amy Clarke and Cath Senker. In 2023 Hopeful Solidarities worked with Brighton photographer Natasa Leoni and nine communities and organisations in Brighton and Hove to produce a photography exhibition 'Practices of hope and solidarity' and accompanying online gallery. An earlier blog about this work was published in Sociological Review online magazine. The third research project - a collaboration with Samuel Solomon - is called 'Facing the trouble: cultural workers in Yiddishland, political Zionism, and the movement for Palestinian liberation' and based on a new set of interviews.

These projects build on Ben's previous research which was based on two main themes:

1 Social and historical geographies of identity, 'race', place, class, faith and migration in England

Read the multi-authored symposium on 'Brexit, race and migration' that Ben contributed to (via this link). Browse through it to read Ben's contribution "Brexit writings and the war of position over migration, 'race' and class".

Read Ben's article (with Clare Rishbeth) on benches in public space, exploring themes of conviviality, self-care and bench design. This research involved case studies in Woolwich and Sutton as part of The Unsociable Bench project, led by Clare, a landscape architect at the University of Sheffield, in collaboration with film-maker Esther Johnson, the Greenwich Inclusion Project and the Young Foundation. 

From 2011 to 2013 Ben held an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Fellowship entitled Places for All? A Multi-Media Investigation of Citizenship, Work and Belonging in a Fast-Changing Provincial City. The Fellowship, which ran from March 2011 until November 2013, formed part of the Royal Society of Arts' Citizen Power in Peterborough Programme. In collaboration with arts practitioner colleagues, Ben explored the commonality of multiple place attachments within and across national borders, using oral history, film, photography, and theatre. The Fellowship also involved an investigation of changing employment patterns in Peterborough in the context of the building of new residential areas and relatively high levels of inward migration. For details of film, theatre, photography and academic papers from the project go to placesforall.co.uk

Ben's earlier work with historian Becky Taylor used archival, ethnographic and oral history evidence to disrupt the popular idea that white working class communities are fixed in place and threatened by the arrival of immigrants and people of colour. This research, mostly based in the English provincial city of Norwich, was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)'s Identities and Social Action programme. One of the key arguments of Ben and Becky's subsequent book Moving Histories of Class and Community: Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England (Palgrave, 2009) is that white working-class emigration, and the continued stretching of 'indigenous' lifeworlds both within and across national boundaries, have influenced contemporary debates on 'race' and immigration. They also question the ethnicization of class in these debates (see their contribution to the collection on Integration, Disadvantage and Extremism edited by David Feldman and Ben Gidley). A second key argument stresses the importance of relationality and ambivalence in subjective experiences of class and place, not least in schools and in universities. The book was drawn on in a Guardian article by Lynsey Hanley, who also wrote the Foreword to the 2011 paperback edition.

Read Ben and Becky's discussion of the relations between a British university and its working-class neighbours; and a follow-up piece by Ben on class and spatial justice, drawing on his collaboration with Becky as well as on his AHRC Fellowship research in Peterborough. 

Ben was co-investigator in a further exploratory project, funded by the research councils' Connected Communities programme, called Sacred Communities: Connected Practices Across Place and Time. This research - a collaboration with anthropologist Abby Day - included a review of transcripts from a total of 143 interviews, conducted as part of Ben and Becky's previous work in Norwich and Abby's in North Yorkshire. The research aimed to produce new insights on the everyday, embodied practices of faith and community, focusing on the ways such practices stretch (and change) across space and time.

2 Political economic geographies of temporary migrant work in India and the UK

Ben conducted further research with current and former food factory and warehouse workers in Peterborough as part of the AHRC-funded project Creative Interruptions (2016-19), led by Sarita Malik at Brunel University. With Director Jay Gearing of Red 7 Productions he researched and co-produced Workers, a film in ten chapters narrated by research participants. (see the film, and read Ben and Jay's blog in The Sociological Review about making the film). During this period, Ben was Writer-in-Residence at the arts organisation MetalPeterborough.

See Ben's review of Judy Fudge and Kendra Strauss' book Temporary work, agencies and unfree labour for Society and Space Open Site. 

Listen to both Ben and Kendra discussing the topic of gang labour on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed. 

Read Ben's Open Democracy blog on the use of a discourse of slavery to influence immigration politics. 

Ben's research on work-place regimes for temporary migrant workers has focused mainly on the agricultural sector. In the UK he has carried out in-depth interviews with employers, labour contractors, workers and food retailers, and revealed how the concentration of market power at the retailer end of the food supply chain has led to the intensification of work for people employed in food production. (see Publications section for articles published from this research in 2008 in Population, Space and Place and Third World Quarterly)

Ben's multi-scale research insists on simultaneous attention both to the political economic causes of inequality in capitalist work-places, and to workers' subjectivities, including various forms of resistance. He has attempted to extend writing on labour geographies, which previously focused largely on the agency of workers who are organised in unions, to consider the specific spatiotemporalities of workers hired for just a few weeks or months at a time and who often rely on employers for both accommodation and transport (see Publications for his articles on this theme in Geography Compass (2009), Environment and Planning A (2012) and (co-authored with Kaveri Qureshi) Geoforum (2017). He co-edited a themed issue of Geoforum entitled 'Labour geographies on the move: migration, migrant status and work in the 21st century' with Michelle Buckley and Siobhán MacPhee. Ben also worked with Siobhán McGrath to contribute insights from their separate research projects towards innovative and critical approaches to teaching on unfree labour.

Ben collaborated in research on temporary migrant workers in India with colleagues Janet Seeley, Abdur Rafique and Deeptima Massey. A book of research participants' life histories Known Face, Unknown Life: Voices of Temporary Migrants in West Bengal, edited by Abdur Rafique, has been published in Bengali. An English translation is available here.