Staff Profile
Dr Niall Cunningham
Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Human Geography
- Email: niall.cunningham@ncl.ac.uk
- Telephone: 0191 208 3567
- Personal Website: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/gps/staff/profile/niallcunningham.html#background
- Address: Room 3.104
3rd Floor, Henry Daysh Building,
School of Geography, Politics & Sociology,
Newcastle University
Newcastle Upon Tyne
NE1 3RU
UK
My work is in geographies of class and race, tackling the historical dynamics, lived realities and politics of inequalities between groups and individuals. My background spans the disciplines of history, sociology and geography. I have taught and conducted research at universities across the north of England and prior to that I taught at secondary schools in both the UK and Japan. I am a UK-state qualified secondary school teacher and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. I started off in academia in 2008 as Research Associate and part-time doctoral student on an AHRC funded project mapping political violence and changing socio-economic geographies in Ireland. In 2011 I joined CRESC: The ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change at the University of Manchester as Research Fellow before moving to the North-East of England in 2015 lecturing at Durham University. I joined Newcastle in August 2019.
Qualifications
2008-2014: PhD in Historical Geography, Lancaster University, UK (Part-Time)
2006-2007: MSc in Geographical Information Systems, University of Leeds, UK
2000-2001: PGCE in Secondary Education (History), Institute of Education, University of London, UK
1997-1998: MA in History, University College Dublin, Ireland
1994-1997: BA(Hons) in Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, UK
Previous University Posts
2008-2010 - Research Associate, Department of History, Lancaster University, UK
2011-2015 - Research Associate in Quantitative Analyses of Social and Cultural Participation, CRESC: ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, University of Manchester, UK
2015-2019 - Assistant Professor of Human Geography, Department of Geography, Durham University, UK
Boundaries, Belonging and Conflict
My research interests and outputs can be broadly classified into two main areas of activity. The first is within the sub-discipline of political geography and coheres around issues of identity, place and boundary-making. Most of my work in this area has focussed on the Irish context. I started off in academia working on the construction of an Historical Geographical Information System or HGIS using census and other statistical data to understand long-term changes in the socio-economic and ethnic composition of the island of Ireland over the period since the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century. My PhD was on spatial patterns of ethnic violence in the city of Belfast during the twentieth century, covering the two greatest periods of unrest in the city's history, those surrounding partition and the creation of Northern Ireland between 1920 and 1922, and the more protracted and better-known 'Troubles' from 1969 to 2001. I maintain an active interest in using 'traditional' historical methodologies and sources alongside innovative digital approaches. In this strand of work I am also seeking to broaden out considerations of social and political borders to think through the selective permeability of national and neighbourhood boundaries based upon the inequalities associated with class and race.
Class, Race, and Structures of Urban Inequality and Materiality
The other major thrust in my work lies around an engagement with issues of social class - and my published work in recent years has contributed to debates on the wider 'spatialisation of class'. This interest stemmed from my time at CRESC: The ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, where one of the projects I was involved in was the BBC's 'Great British Class Survey' (GBCS). The GBCS sought to develop conceptions of social class beyond traditional 'employment aggregate' approaches to consider the wider social and cultural drivers and implications of class position through the adoption of a Bourdieusian conceptual lens. The initial findings were published as 'A New Model of Social Class' in 2013, and further developed in the popular monograph, Social Class in the 21st Century (Penguin: 2015). This has also led to a wider series of interventions on class structure in urban space, and I am currently thinking some of these issues through in a comparative context, through an AHRC/ESRC-funded grant, designed to build a network of scholarship between the UK and Japan with a series of online/hybrid public and student events to be hosted in both countries in the Autumn/Winter of 2021/2022. You can find out more at our website: https://conferences.ncl.ac.uk/culture,class,connection/. I am also deeply interested in the wider 'costs of class', and have also published on the implications of economic crisis, class location and spatio-social mobility for mental and physical health and wellbeing.
External Grant Funding
2020: ESRC Advancing Business Collaboration (ABC) ECR Call 2020: (Co-I) 'Impact of Greening Wingrove and Arthur's Hill Community Interest Company on the Health and Wellbeing of the Community' (£3,250)
2019: ESRC Social Science Humanities Japan-UK Connections Call: (P.I.) 'Culture, Class, Connection: Bridging Debates on Social Class and Inequality in the UK and Japan' (£60,547)
2019: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) – Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research – Challenging Research (Exploratory): Co-I) ‘Inequality and Precarity in Global Perspective’ (¥5,000,000 (£33,097)
2018: Recession and Mental Health in Scotland: Do Personal or Community Factors Promote Resilience to Labour Market (£9247.00 from ESRC Centre for Social and Economic Research on Innovation in Genomics (INNOGEN))
2017: ESRC Secondary Data Analysis Initiative: (Co-I) 'Recession and Mental Health in Scotland: Do Personal or Community Factors Promote Resilience to Labour Market Change?' (£163,000)
2016: British Academy: (PI) 'The Greatest Turn of the Ratchet: Belfast 1920-22' SG161841 (£5,857)
2016: European Commission Horizon 2020: (Co-I.) ‘NATure-based URban innoVATION’. H2020-EU.3.5.4.2 ID: 730243 (€7.8 million)
2013: ESRC Festival of Social Science 2013: (P.I.) ‘Class Matters: Understanding Inequality in Contemporary Britain’, Public Event, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, 8 November 2013 (£1,750)
2010: British Academy: (named researcher) 'Mapping the Congregations of God: The Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 1851-2001' SG090803 (£7,031)
In academic year 2021-22, I teach on the following modules:
- GEO1015: Human Geographies of the UK
- GEO2110: Social Geographies (Module Leader in Semester 1)
- GEO2043: Key Methods for Human Geographers (Module Leader)
- GEO2111: Doing Human Geography Research: Theory and Practice
- GEO3099: Dissertation in Human Geography
- GEO8015: Doing Geographical Research
My consultation and feedback hours in 2021-22 are:
- Mondays: 2-4
- Wednesday: 10:30-11:30
Please book at: Niall Cunningham's Feedback, Guidance & Consultation Hours 2021-22 (office365.com)
- Victoria Smith (May 2019) ‘Using
Agent-Based Modelling and Social Network Analysis to understand power and
interaction in CAtchment Based Approaches (CABA) to water network management’
- Mildred Ajebon (June 2019) ‘Geographical Perspectives on the Social Determinants of Inequalities in Under-Five Mortality in Nigeria: Towards an Integrated Approach.
- Hannah Holmes (March 2020) 'Spaces of Demarginalisation: Processes, Policies and Politics in Addressing Territorial Stigma in Middlehaven, Middlesbrough'.
- Eleojo Abubakar (September 2020) 'Socio-spatial analysis of small-area need and accessibility of primary healthcare services in Nigeria: A sequential mixed methods study'.
I am always pleased to receive enquiries on potential PhD supervision relating to my areas of research activity.
- Cherrie M, Curtis S, Baranyi G, Cunningham N, Dibben C, Bambra C, Pearce J. A data linkage study of the effects of the Great Recession and austerity on antidepressant prescription usage. European Journal of Public Health 2021, 31(2), 297-303.
- Cherrie M, Curtis S, Baranyi G, Cunningham N, Dibben C, Bambra C, Pearce J. A data linkage study of the effects of the Great Recession and austerity on antidepressant prescription usage. European Journal of Public Health 2021, 31(2), 297-303.
- Hopkins P, Newcastle Social Geographies Collective, Pain R, Shaw R, Gao Q, Bonnett A, Jones C, Richardson M, Rzedzian S, Benwell MC, Lin W, McAreavey R, Stenning A, Blazek M, Pande R, Najib K, Finlay R, Nayak A, Ridley G, Mearns G, Bonner-Thompson C, McLaughlin J, Boussalem A, Iqbal N, Heslop J, Jarvis H, Burrows R, Bambra C, Copeland A, Tate S, Campbell E, Thompson M, James A, Raynor R, Cunningham N, Powells G, Herbert J, Hocknell S, ed. Social Geographies: An Introduction. London, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021.
- Curtis S, Cunningham N, Pearce J, Congdon P, Cherrie M, Atkinson S. Trajectories in mental health and socio-spatial conditions in a time of economic recovery and austerity: a longitudinal study in England 2011-17. Social Science & Medicine 2021, 270, 113654.
- Cunningham N. Data. In: Newcastle Social Geographies Collective, ed. Social Geographies: An Introduction. London: Rowman & Littlefied, 2020.
- Cunningham N. Statistics and Data. In: Darling J; Wilson H, ed. Research Ethics in Human Geography. London: Sage, 2020, pp.82-87.
- Cunningham N. The politics of place: violence as a territorial marker. In: Storey, D, ed. A Research Agenda for Territory and Territoriality. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2020, pp.103-126.
- Cherrie M, Curtis S, Baranyi G, McTaggart S, Cunningham N, Licence K, Dibben C, Bambra C, Pearce J. Use of sequence analysis for classifying individual antidepressant trajectories to monitor population mental health. BMC Psychiatry 2020, 20, 551.
- Cunningham N. The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich by Cristobal Young [Book review]. American Journal of Sociology 2019, 125(2), 629-631.
- Curtis S, Pearce J, Cherrie M, Dibben C, Cunningham N, Bambra C. Changing labour market conditions during the ‘great recession’ and mental health in Scotland 2007–2011: an example using the Scottish Longitudinal Study and data for local areas in Scotland. Social Science and Medicine 2019, 227, 1-9.
- Recchi E, Favell A, Apaydin F, Barbulescu R, Braun M, Ciornei I, Cunningham N, Diez Medrano J, Duru D, Hanquinet L, Solgaard Jensen J, Potzschke S, Reimer D, Salamonska J, Savage M, Varela A. Everyday Europe: Social Transnationalism in an Unsettled Continent. Bristol: Policy Press, 2019.
- Cunningham N. Making and mapping Britain's 'new ordinary elite'. Urban Geography 2019, 40(5), 604-626.
- Savage M, Hanquinet L, Cunningham N, Hjellbrekke J. Emerging Cultural Capital in the City: Profiling London and Brussels. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2018, 42(1), 138-149.
- Cooper C, Bracken L, Cunningham N. Exploring the Relationships Between Social, Economic and Health Factors and Nature-Based Solutions in European Cities. Naturvation Working Paper Series 2018, Deliverable 2.3, 63.
- Cunningham N, Miles A, Leguina A. The Ghosts of Class: Space, Waste and Hope in the Ex-Industrial North. In: Dodsworth F; Walford A, ed. A World Laid Waste? Responding to the Social, Cultural and Political Consequences of Globalisation. London: Routledge, 2018.
- Cunningham N, Snee H, Devine F. A Classless Society? Making Sense of Inequalities in the UK with the Great British Class Survey. In: Fee, D; Kober-Smith, A, ed. Inequalities in the UK: Perceptions, Actions, Evolutions. Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2017.
- Savage M, Hecht K, Hjellbrekke J, Cunningham N, Laurison D. An Anatomy of the British Economic "Elite". In: Korsnes O; Heilbron J; Hjellbrekke J; Buhlmann F; Savage M, ed. New Directions in Elite Studies. London: Routledge, 2017.
- Cunningham N, Savage M. An elite and intensifying city: New geographies of social class and inequality in contemporary London. CITY 2017, 21(1), 25-46.
- Cunningham N, Gregory I. Appendix: Mapping Ireland’s Changing Demography, 1834-2002. In: Biagini, EF; Daly, ME, ed. The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp.604-620.
- Brown L, Cunningham N. The Inner Geographies of a Migrant Gateway: Mapping the Built Environment and the Dynamics of Caribbean Mobility in Manchester, 1951-2011. Social Science History 2016, 40(1), 93-120.
- Gregory I, Cunningham N. 'The judgement of God on an indolent and unself-reliant people'?: the impact of the Great Irish Famine on Ireland's religious demography. Journal of Historical Geography 2016, 51, 76-87.
- Savage M, Cunningham N. Why Inequality Matters: The Lessons of Brexit. Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 2016. Available at: http://items.ssrc.org/why-inequality-matters-the-lessons-of-brexit/.
- Cunningham N. 'A sort of whirlwind': Mapping the Changing Geography of Presbyterian Religious Observance in Ireland. International Review of Sociology 2015, 25(2), 218-234.
- Savage M, Devine F, Cunningham N, Friedman D, Laurison D, Miles A, Snee H, Taylor M. On Social Class, Anno 2014. Sociology 2015, 49(6), 1011-1030.
- Savage M, Cunningham N, Devine F, Friedman S, Laurison D, McKenzie L, Miles A, Snee H, Wakeling P. Social Class in the 21st Century. London: Penguin, 2015.
- Cunningham N, Savage M. The secret garden? Elite metropolitan geographies in the contemporary UK. Sociological Review 2015, 63(2), 321-348.
- Cunningham N, Gregory I. Hard to miss, easy to blame? Peacelines, interfaces and political deaths during the Belfast Troubles, 1969-2001. Political Geography 2014, 40, 64-78.
- Ell P, Cunningham N, Gregory I. No spatial watershed: religious geographies of Ireland pre-and post-Famine. In: Corporaal, M; Cusack, C; Janssen, L; van den Beuken, R, ed. Global Legacies of the Great Irish Famine: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Bern: Peter Lang, 2014, pp.197-224.
- Cunningham N. 'Troubled Geographies': An Historical GIS of Religion, Society and Conflict in Ireland Since the Great Famine. In: Gregory, I; Geddes, A, ed. Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS and Spatial History. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014.
- Cunningham N. "The Integrity of Their Quarrel": A Spatial Analysis of Conflict Deaths during the Troubles in Belfast, 1969-2001. CRESC Working Paper Series 2013, (133), 1-24.
- CRESC Encounters Collaborative The. ‘(Un)doing Collaboration: Reflections on the Practices of Collaborative Research. CRESC Working Paper 127 2013.
- Cunningham N. “A sort of whirlwind”: Political Violence and Changing Patterns of Presbyterian Religious Observance in Ireland. In: Proceedings of the EUREL-CRESC Colloquium 2012: Religion and Territory. 2013, University of Manchester, UK: EUREL.
- Savage M, Devine F, Li Y, Cunningham N, Taylor M, Hjellbrekke J, Le Roux B, Friedman S, Miles A. A new model of social class: findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey experiment. Sociology 2013, 47(2), 219-250.
- Cunningham N, Gregory I. Religious change in 20th century Ireland: A spatial history. Irish Geography 2013.
- Cunningham N. 'The doctrine of vicarious punishment’: space, religion and the Belfast Troubles of 1920-22. Journal of Historical Geography 2013, 40(1), 52-66.
- Cunningham N. The Social Geography of Violence During the Belfast Troubles, 1920-22. CRESC Working Paper 122 2013.
- Gregory I, Cunningham N, Lloyd C, Shuttleworth I, Ell P. Troubled Geographies: A Spatial History of Religion and Society in Ireland. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013.