Jenny Phillimore

Professor of Migration and Superdiversity and Director of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS)

Jenny Phillimore is Professor of Migration and Superdiversity and Director of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS) at the University of Birmingham.

Jenny is Project Lead for the UPWEB project responsible for the smooth running of the project across all four sites and for co-ordinating collaborative and interdisciplinary activity. The UPWEB project enables Jenny to focus upon a number of the research and methods interests that she has developed over the past decade. These research interests include:

  • Access to welfare in superdiverse areas
  • The role of social capital and networks in supporting migrants' access to integration resources
  • Health and migration
  • Small scale civil society activity
  • Refugee integration and psycho-social wellbeing
  • Community research
  • Modelling of diverse populations

She has published widely in these areas in journals such as Critical Social Policy, Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Policy and Society, Journal of Social Policy, Urban Studies and Voluntary Sector Review. She has also co-written books on qualitative and community research methods.

In addition to her work on UPWEB, Jenny also leads the migrant perspectives on integration study which is part of the European Integration Funded Knowledge in Integration Governance (KING) project, with partners in Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and Germany and is PI on two Marie Curie Fellowships looking respectively at social anchoring as a new concept to understand migrant integration and the ways that new migrants from non-traditional communities use civil society to aid settlement. She is an expert participant in the TLANG project which focuses on translanguaging in superdiverse neighbourhoods and co-investigator on a British Academy funded grant looking at the ways in which migrants' health beliefs and behaviours evolve after migration.

Jenny sits on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Social Policy, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Senate at the University of Birmingham. She has been a government advisor on migrant integration and social cohesion for local, regional, national and European governments and has appeared widely in UK and EU media.