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Staff Profile

Dr Niall Cunningham

Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Human Geography

Background

My work sits at the intersection of the disciplines of geography, history and sociology, with a focus on the geographies of class and race and tackling the conceptualisation, distribution and lived realities of inequalities between groups and individuals. Before coming to Newcastle in 2019 I was Assistant Professor in Human Geography at Durham University and between 2011 and 2015 Research Fellow in Quantitative Analyses of Social and Cultural Participation at CRESC: The ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change at the University of Manchester. My first academic role was as Research Associate in History at Lancaster University in 2008. I am a UK state qualified secondary school teacher and taught in schools in the north of England and in Japan. I am also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. I am currently Chair of the Board of Examiners for Geography.   

My Feedback, Guidance & Consultation hours in academic year 2023-2024 are:

- Mondays: 9-11

- Wednesdays: 11-12

Academic Qualifications

PhD in History, Lancaster University (2014)

MSc in Geographical Information Systems, University of Leeds (2007)

MA in History, University College Dublin (1998)

BA(Hons) in Irish Studies, University of Liverpool (1997)

 

Professional Qualifications

PGCHET, Durham University (2016)

PGCE in Secondary History, Institute of Education, University of London (2001)

Research

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 centrally 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 have been developing work on some of these issues in a comparative context, through an AHRC/ESRC-funded grant, designed to build a network of scholarship between the UK and Japan. You can find out more at our website: https://conferences.ncl.ac.uk/culture,class,connection/. Our associated JSPS grant seeks to extend these themes in a Global South context. My most recent work has reflected my interest in the wider 'costs of class', and has addressed the implications of economic crisis, class location and spatio-social mobility for mental and physical health and wellbeing. 

 

External Grant Funding

2023: Wellcome Trust: (Collaborator) 'North and South: Regional Health Inequalities in England' (£913,683)

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)

 

Teaching

In academic year 2023-2024 I teach on the following modules:                                                       

  • GEO2043: Key Methods for Human Geographers 
  • GEO2111: Doing Human Geography Research: Theory and Practice
  • GEO2236: Between Two Unions: Ireland Human Geography Fieldcourse (Module Leader)
  • GEO8015: Doing Geographical Research

My Feedback, Guidance & Consultation hours in academic year 2023-2024 are:

  • Mondays: 9-11
  • Wednesdays:11-12

To date I have supervised the following doctoral students to successful completion alongside colleagues at Durham and Northumbria: 

  1. 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’ 
  2. Mildred Ajebon (June 2019) ‘Geographical Perspectives on the Social Determinants of Inequalities in Under-Five Mortality in Nigeria: Towards an Integrated Approach. 
  3. Hannah Holmes (March 2020) 'Spaces of Demarginalisation: Processes, Policies and Politics in Addressing Territorial Stigma in Middlehaven, Middlesbrough'.
  4. Eleojo Abubakar (September 2020) 'Socio-spatial analysis of small-area need and accessibility of primary healthcare services in Nigeria: A sequential mixed methods study'.
  5. Paul Barber (May 2022) ‘The Uniformed Cadet Forces: Evidencing the Difficulties Volunteers and Volunteer Organisations experience in delivering youth training services’.
  6. Clair Cooper (September 2022) ‘A pan-European Analysis of the Distribution of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) in Urban Space and their Relation to Socio-Spatial Inequalities and Modes of Governance’.


I am always pleased to receive enquiries on potential PhD supervision relating to my areas of research activity.

 

Publications