RESEARCHERS at Queen’s University Belfast have been awarded £1 million funding to examine and explain ethnic diversity and inequalities in the UK.
The three-year 'Geographies of Ethnic Diversity and Inequalities' project will focus on ethnic diversity, residential segregation, socio-spatial inequalities and migration.
Two post-doctoral research fellows will be employed and based at QUB for the project, which will launch in February 2023 and is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
Later this month, the Office for National Statistics will release Census 2021 data on ethnic group, national identity, language, and religion in England and Wales and this will be one of the key focus areas for the researchers.
It is expected that the research carried out by QUB will be used for policy, political and public understandings of how the UK's population, and its neighbourhoods, are changing.
Dr Gemma Catney, who is leading the project, said the funding will "enable us to provide timely and impactful evidence on the ways in which ethnic diversity has grown".
"Our project will also seek to uncover the nature of the differing - and persistently unequal - neighbourhood experiences of people from different ethnic backgrounds.
"We will be analysing where and why neighbourhoods are becoming more ethnically diverse, the processes that shape these local patterns, how far ethnic and racial inequalities have widened, and the geography of disadvantage."
She added that previous research show that "households and neighbourhoods right across the UK are becoming increasingly ethnically and racially mixed and diverse".
"Alongside these demographic changes, the uneven impacts of, for example, the COVID-19 pandemic and austerity measures have shone a light on persistent ethnic and racial inequalities, between people and across local areas," she said.
