Dr Ben Gidley

Ben Gidley’s research interests focus on contemporary forms of racialization and intercultural encounter; diaspora, diversity and migration; and urban sociology. Much of his work has been on urban contexts, including a long-term ethnographic engagement with Southeast London and historical work in East London, although increasingly setting this in a comparative European context. He also has an interest in British Jews, both in relation to wider diaspora formations and in relation to the history and politics of British multiculture. His research draws on a range of methodological approaches, including participatory action research, visual methods, archival research and ethnography.

Books

•  Jews and Muslims in Europe: between discourse and experience, Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion 13. Brill, 2022 (co-edited with S. Everett)
• Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe: A Shared Story?, Palgrave, 2017 (co-edited with J. Renton).
• Ethnography, Diversity and Urban Space, Routledge Taylor and Francis, 2014 (co-edited with M. Berg and N. Sigona).
• Turbulent Times: The British Jewish Community Today, Continuum, 2010, (with K. Kahn-Harris).
• Community Engagement and Community Cohesion, The Policy Press, 2018, (with M. Mayo et al)

Book Chapters

• “Locality, spatiality and contingency In East London: an interview with Michael Keith”, in: Everett, S. and Gidley, Ben (eds.) Jews and Muslims in Europe: Between Discourse and Experience. Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, Brill, 2022.
• “Understanding and resisting left-right convergence in the Internet age”, in Chamberlain, P. and Lyons, M.N. and Scher, A. and Sunshine, S. (eds.) Exposing the Right and Fighting for Democracy: Celebrating Chip Berlet as Journalist and Scholar. Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right. Routledge, 2021.
• “Ethics, relationships and power: Failing better at convivially researching spaces of diversity”, in Mette Louise Berg and Magdalena Nowicka (eds.) Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture: Convivial Tools for Research and Practice, UCL Press, 2019.
• “Spaces of informal learning and cultures of translation and marginality in London’s Jewish East End”, in: Nichols, S. and Dobson, S. (eds.) Learning Cities: Multimodal Explorations and Placed Pedagogies. Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 8, Springer Singapore, 2018, pp. 169-182.
• “Mainstreaming in practice: the efficiencies and deficiencies of mainstreaming for street-level bureaucrats”, in Peter Scholten and Irene van Breugel (eds.) Mainstreaming Integration Governance: New Trends in Migrant Integration Policies in Europe, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 153-168 (with P. Scholten and I. Breugel).
• “Communities and Identity”, in Yousef Meri (ed.) Routledge Handbook Of Muslim-Jewish Relations. Routledge, 2016, French and Arabic editions to follow, (with N. Meer).
• “”They’ve got their wine bars; we’ve got our pubs”: Housing, diversity and community in two South London neighbourhoods”, in Ferruccio Pastore and Irene Ponzo (eds.) Inter-group Relations and Migrant Integration in European Cities: Changing Neighbourhoods, Springer, 2016, (with O. Jenson).
• “Conflicto y convivencia en los barrios urbanos diversos de Europa reintroducir los derechos humanos y la justicia social en el debate sobre la integración’ in Ángeles Solanes Corella (ed.) Diversidad Cultural y Conflictos en la Unión Europea. Implicaciones Jurídicopolíticas, Tirant lo Blanch, 2016.
• “Speaking of the Working class”, in Bridget Anderson and Vanessa Hughes (eds.) Citizenship and its Others, Palgrave, 2015.
• “Historicising diaspora spaces: performing faith, race and place in London’s East End”, in Jane Garnett (ed.) Religion in Diaspora: Cultures of Citizenship, Palgrave, 2015 (with N. Ahmed et al).
• “Cultures of translation: East London, diaspora space and an imagined cosmopolitan tradition”,in Nando Sigona et al (eds.) Diasporas Reimagined: Spaces, Practices and Belonging, IMI, 2015.
• “From Security to Insecurity: British Jewish Communal Leadership in the Context of Multiculturalism”, in Harvey E. Goldberg et al (eds.) Dynamic Belonging: Contemporary Jewish Collective Identities, Berghahn, 2011 (with K. Kahn-Harris).
• “Asdatown: The intersections of classed places and identities”, in Yvonne Taylor (ed.) Our Working-Class Lives: Classed Connections and Intersections, Ashgate, 2010 (with A. Rooke).
• “Ghosts of Kishinev in the East End”, in Nadia Valman and Eitan Bar-Yosef (eds.) The ‘Jew’ in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa, Palgrave, 2009.
• “Youth Culture and Ethnicity: Emerging Youth Multiculture in South London”, in Paul Hodkinson and Wolfgang Deicke (eds.) Youth Cultures. Routledge Advances in Sociology, Routledge, 2007.
• “Sure Start: an upstream approach to reducing health inequalities?”, in Angela Scriven and Sebastian Garman (eds.) Public Health: Social context and action, Open University Press, 2007.
• “Historical and Archival Methods”, in Clive Seale (ed.) Researching Society and Culture (Second Edition), Sage, 2004, Reprinted (2012) in Third Edition.

Journal Articles

• ‘Response to Richard Kuper’, The Political Quarterly, Volume 91, Issue 4, November 2020, pp. 839-840 (with David Feldman and Brendan McGeever).
• ‘Welfare micropublics and inequality: urban super-diversity in a time of austerity‘, Ethnic and Racial Studies 42,15, 2019, pp.2723-2742 (with M.L. Berg and A. Krausova).
• ‘Researching the ordinary‘ in Ethnic and Racial Studies 42,3, 2019, pp.402-406.
• ‘Getting away from the noise Jewish-Muslim interactions and narratives in E1/Barbès‘, Francospheres 7,2, 2018, pp. 173-195.
• ‘Shifting markers of identity in East London’s diasporic religious spaces’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39, 2, 2016 (with N. Ahmed et al).
• ‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Account of Jewish Socialism: Class, Identity and Immigration in Edwardian London‘, Socialist History 45, 2014.
• ‘Special issue: Ethnography, Diversity and Urban Space‘, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 20, 4, 2013 (with M. Berg and N. Sigona).
• ‘Landscapes of Belonging, Portraits of life: A visual ethnography of a diverse housing estate’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 20, 4, 2013.
• ‘Diasporic Memory and the Call to Identity: Yiddish migrants in early twentieth century East London’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 34, 6, 2013.
• ‘Contemporary Anglo-Jewish Community and Leadership: Coping with Multiculturalism’, British Journal of Sociology, 63, 1, 2012 (with K. Kahn-Harris.
• ‘A note on the awkwardness of the ethnographer’, Sociological Review, vol. 57, no. 3, 2009.
• ‘Community empowerment and community cohesion: parallel agendas for community building in England?’, Journal of Social Intervention: Theory and Practice, 18, 1, 2009 (with M. Mayo et al).

• Identity, belonging and citizenship in the cities of the future,  London: Government Office for Science, forthcoming 2018.
• Antisemitism and Immigration in Western Europe: Is There a Connection? The Case of the UK, Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, University of London, 2018 (with D. Feldman).
• 50 days in the summer: Gaza, political protest and antisemitism in the UK, Sub-Report for the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism, 2015.
• Integration Disadvantage and Extremism, Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism, University of London,  2014 (co-edited with D. Feldman).
• Concordia Discors: Diversity, Cohesion and Change in Two South London Neighbourhoods, COMPAS, 2012 (with O. Jensen).

Ben Gidley is currently the Module Convenor for three BA Psychosocial Studies modules, Hate, Urban Multicultures, and Class.

He currently supervises postgraduate students who are working on: Jewish, Muslim and Christian young people in London; whiteness and Italian migrants in London; Jewish masculinity; urban protest in Athens; and a disremembered paupers’ burial ground in inner South London.

Ben welcomes applications from MPhil/PhD students and visiting research students who wish to carry out research on: urban ethnography, lived experience of diversity, comparative urbanism, diasporic belonging; antisemitism, particularly in relation to other forms of racialization; Anglo-Jewish history and sociology, Jewish/non-Jewish relations; urban social movements; fascism and anti-fascism; South and East London.

• ‘At least the Nazis kept the lights on’: Brexit amnesia airbrushes out genocide in the Channel Islands’, Byline Times, 10 May 2021.
• ‘Gauging Antisemitism in Labour’, RACE.ED, 21 December 2020 (with Brendan McGeever and David Feldman).
• ‘The EHRC Report Shows How Difficult Building Real Anti-Racist Politics Will Be’, The Guardian, 3 November 2020 (with David Feldman and Brendan McGeever).
• ‘Labour and Antisemitism: a Crisis Misunderstood’ Political Quarterly Blog, 29 May 2020 (with David Feldman and Brendan McGeever).
• ‘Labour Can Expel Antisemites – but that won’t ‘Root Out’ Antisemitism in our Culture’, The Guardian, 8 April 2020 (with David Feldman and Brendan McGeever).
• ‘Who is Allowed to be Human? ‘Bare Life’ in Aleppo and on the Mediterranean“, Wildcat Dispatches, December 2016.
• ‘Social justice must be at the heart of a renewed strategy for integration and cohesion“, Birkbeck Comments, December 2016 (with David Feldman).
• ‘Absent Experts and Public Debates About Integration“, Sociological Review, December 2016. [republished by LSE Religion in Society]
• ‘Multiculturalismo: pros y contras del sistema británico de integración no regulada”, Vanguardia Dossier Nº 58: El futuro del Reino Unido, April/June 2015.
• ‘The UK tumbles out of top ten in key immigration ranking’, The Conversation. 30 June 2015.
• ‘It’s time to put integration back on the agenda’, Left Foot Forward. 30 June 2015.
• ‘An evidence base for a rights-based approach to migrant integration policy’, MRN Migration Pulse. 17 June 2015.
• ‘Not racist, just resentful’, COMPASblog 20 May 2015.
• ‘Multiculturalismo: pros y contras del sistema británico de integración no regulada’, Vanguardia Dossier Nº 58: El futuro del Reino Unido. April/June 2015.
• ‘How do local authorities deal with the increasing diversity of their clients and residents?’ COMPASblog. 24 February 2015.
• ‘Understanding foreign fighters’, COMPASblog. 26 November 2014.
• ‘Integration: a European research agenda’, COMPASblog. 21 May 2014.
• ‘Calm hysteria and assess the real local impact of migration’, The Conversation. 10 July 2013.
• ‘Nostalgia and diversity: Understanding integration at the local level’, COMPASblog. 21 May 2013.
• ‘Five principles of integration: policies and inclusion’, COMPASblog. 27 November 2012.
• ‘Creating the Conditions for Integration’, COMPASblog. 28 February 2012.
• ‘Real integration takes time’, COMPASblog. 27 July 2011.
• ‘The Left, Social Theory, and Terror’, Dissent. 11 September 2010.
• ‘On Irony and Forgiveness’, Dissent. 20 July 2010.
• ‘On Brick Lane: Are Jews the Model Immigrants?’, Dissent. 30 June 2010.
• Round, S. ‘Interview: Keith Kahn-Harris and Ben Gidley’, Jewish Chronicle. 28 July 2010.