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Staff Profile

Dr Bethan Harries

Senior Lecturer

Background

Dr Bethan Harries is a sociologist specialising in ethnographic and creative research methods. Her research sits at the intersection of race, citizenship, and nationalism studies and examines how racialised processes shape political organising, public discourse, and everyday experiences across different national and regional contexts, with particular attention to minority nations and peripheral regions. Bethan’s work investigates how ideas of race and nation are reproduced and contested through institutions, policy, and cultural narratives. She has a strong interest in the role of militarism and security in shaping social relations and political imaginaries, especially in regions positioned at the margins of the state. She has also conducted research on the ageing of racialised minority communities, exploring how older people experience health and social care systems, and how race and migration status intersect to shape later life.

Bethan’s recent projects include collaborative studies examining the politics of race and citizenship within devolved and regional contexts, and creative, community-based initiatives that explore how national and racial imaginaries are lived and represented. She is currently developing research on militarism in peripheral regions, investigating how military infrastructures, economies, and narratives intersect with questions of race, inequality, and state power. She was recently awarded funding from the Catherine Cookson Foundation for the project, 'Threads of Duty: gender, textiles and the hidden histories of regimental life'.

Her interdisciplinary collaborations bring together scholars, artists, and community partners to foster inclusive and critically engaged research.

Bethan sits on the advisory board for University of Wales Press book series, 'Race/Ethnicity Wales and the World'. She is a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy and an honorary fellow of the Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity.  

Bethan worked as an immigration lawyer in Bradford for several years and as an international election observer prior to joining academia.

Research

CURRENT PROJECTS

Threads of duty: gender, textiles and the hidden histories of regimental life (2026)

Funded by the Catherine Cookson Foundation and in collaboration with Dr Katie Markham, Newcastle University

This project seeks to broaden and deepen understandings of ordinary soldiers’ experiences of war, regimental life, and the often-overlooked periods of waiting for war. Developed in partnership with the King's Own Scottish Borderers Museum and the artist Mani Kambo, it draws on the regiment’s historical practices of textile-making and handcraft to create new ways of engaging with difficult memories of conflict.

Through collaborative handcrafting workshops with a community of veterans, the project explores the complex, entangled, and everyday dimensions of military life, foregrounding experiences that are rarely visible in official archives or public narratives. Crafting will act as both method and medium: a means of facilitating reflection, conversation, and the articulation of memories that are often hard to express in conventional formats.

By placing veterans at the centre of the research process, the project brings their underacknowledged experiences into view and contributes to more nuanced understandings of military service. It opens space to examine how veteran biographies intersect with local and national histories, as well as with Britain’s colonial legacies. In doing so, the project places lived experience in dialogue with dominant representations of war, including representations that remain highly gendered, shaped by top-down narratives of the nation, and frequently abstracted from the complexities of imperial and colonial histories.




PREVIOUS PROJECTS

Experiences of ageing amongst racially minoritized women in Newcastle (2023-24)

Funded largely by the University’s social justice fund, this project engages with a wide range of local partners with the aim to make Newcastle a better city to grow older in for all women.

Working closely with the Elders Council to expand understanding of the needs of marginalised groups and to improve their engagement and their network’s membership to better reflect the diverse communities they represent. The project combines creative arts approaches with more traditional research methods to bring attention to the experience of ageing amongst racially minoritized women (aged 50+ years) in Newcastle. The creative methodology and the community development work that has built up trust and creative relationships between organizations has enabled this project to achieve exciting collaborations and participation. The project has so far culminated in a written report and an exhibition of collages created by three groups of Chinese and South Asian women and has produced a set of recommendations for the Elders Council, the Local Authority and local NGOs. 


Learning from 'left behind' places: everyday hopes and fears for the future after Brexit in England, 2019-2021, funded by an ESRC Governance After Brexit Grant

This project aims to investigate the everyday hopes and fears for the future after Brexit, from the perspective of residents of four electoral wards in North Tyneside, London and Manchester. The project aims to provide more in-depth, granular information about the way in which Brexit intertwines, or not, with the everyday preoccupations of residents of urban areas that have been hard hit by post-industrial, social and economic changes, and government policies of austerity.

 

Race, nation and devolution, 2017-2020, funded by the Hallsworth fellowship scheme

This work examines how different forms of devolution contribute to and are affected by shifting narratives of nationalism and understandings of citizenship and carry the potential to shape new forms of inclusion and exclusion.

Working with anti-racist networks and community organisations, it also explores the complexities of challenging race in Wales and Scotland.

 

Older BME people’s experiences of health and social care in Greater Manchester: Lessons for practice and policy, 2018-19, funded by the Manchester Statistical Society Campion Fund

This work draws together existing census and survey data and original data gathered through a series of focus groups across Greater Manchester to explore older BME experiences of health and social care. It is driven by concerns around disparities in health, especially in later life and the absence of attention paid to this in relevant policy areas.

  

The lived experience of race over time, ESRC Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE)

This project is based on an extensive range of research in Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester and Newham with residents, community organisations and members of local and national government.  For more info: www.Ethnicity.ac.uk 

 

Conversations about radicalisation

Conversations about radicalisation is a collaboration between young people, school staff, interdisciplinary researchers, and creative artists, that focuses on developing an inclusive and open discussion about how schools approach extremism that speaks to, and is led by, young people. The outputs of this project, including narrative art, video, lyrics and posters, co-produced by the participants, will challenge current approaches.

For more information: http://www.law.manchester.ac.uk/cccj/research/projects/policing-security-and-citizenship/conversations-about-radicalisation/

 

Talking race in young adulthood, funded by the ESRC

This project draws on ethnographic research with young adults in Manchester and engages with ideas of the post-racial to explore how young adults make sense of their identities, relationships and new forms of racism in a neoliberal city. It explores how and in what ways race remains a salient dimension of social experience and presents news ways of thinking about how we live with difference, by analysing the relationship between racism, generational identities and the spatial configurations of a city.




 

Postgraduate Supervision

I am interested in supervising research students on projects related to ethnicity, race and racism; nations and nationalism; memory and nostalgia; migration; youth identities and urban studies.

I also welcome visiting PhD students from other institutions on the same kinds of topics.


Previous PhD students:

Natalie Ann Hall. (2021, ESRC funded) Taking back control: The online political engagement of pro-Leave non-digital-native Facebook users.


Previous Visiting PhD students:

Man Xu, Chinese Muslims and the relational economy of transnational trade brokerage, University of Toronto


Current PhD students:

  • Brightman Makoni (ESRC funded) The Production and Policing of New Categories of Migrants: Zimbabwean migrant families and the UK Health and Care Worker Visa Scheme
  • Sophie Lively (ESRC funded) Narrating Masculinities: Racism, nationalism and belonging amongst working-class men in Tyneside
  •  Harris Paraskevopoulos (ESRC funded). Migrants at work: How legal status and regional geography affect migrant labour market experiences in the UK.




Teaching

I am currently the MA Programme Director, including programmes in Sociology, Sociology and Social Research and Gender.


Postgraduate teaching

I lead MA dissertation module and the MA module, 'Inequalities: issues and intersections'. I also co-lead the MA module 'Engaging with Research' and teach on the MA module, 'Global Sex, Global Race'.


Undergraduate teaching

I am the Module Leader for the Stage 3 module, 'Racism and Society'.


I also supervise research projects at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Publications