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Professor Claire Alexander

Claire Alexander is a Professor of Sociology and Head of the  School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester. She has researched and published work on the issues of race, ethnicity and inequality in Britain – with a particular focus on youth – for over 30 years. Claire has also written on South Asian diaspora and migration to Britain,  racial inequality in Higher Education, race and the curriculum, and the Indian restaurant trade in East London. She is a member of the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE).  Claire is author of The Art of Being Black (1996), The Asian Gang (2000), The Bengal Diaspora (with Joya Chatterji & Annu Jalais)(2016) and The Asian Gang Revisited (2024). 

Professor Ben Ansell

Ben Ansell is Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of Nuffield College. He received his PhD in Government from Harvard University and previously taught at the University of Minnesota. His books include From the Ballot to the Blackboard: The Redistributive Politics of Education, (William H. Riker prize for best book in political economy) and Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach, co-authored with David Samuels (Woodrow Wilson APSA Best Book Prize and the William H. Riker best book in political economy prize) and Inward Conquest, co-authored with Johannes Lindvall. He was Principal Investigator of the European Research Council funded project WEALTHPOL and is a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the 2023 BBC Reith Lecturer, with his lectures building on his recent book Why Politics Fails (Viking / Penguin).

 Professor Eric Klinenberg

Eric Klinenberg is Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Science and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of the new book, 2020: A Reckoning (Bodley Head, 2024), as well as Palaces for the People: How to Build a More Equal and United Society (Vintage, 2018), Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (The Penguin Press, 2012), Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media (Metropolitan Books, 2007), and Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press). He's also co-author, with Aziz Ansari, of the New York Times #1 bestseller Modern Romance (The Penguin Press, 2015). Professor Klinenberg's scholarly work has been published in journals including the American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, and Ethnography, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and This American Life.