University of Leicester

The Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Leicester has a long history of providing excellent teaching to our students and producing internationally renowned, cutting edge research.

The Institute for Social Change is part of a major new investment in research on social change at Manchester which includes the appointment of Professor Robert D. Putnam to a visiting Professorship for five years and a programme of collaborative research with the University of Harvard: Social Change: a joint project of Harvard and Manchester (SCHM). ISC is an interdisciplinary research centre examining the causes and consequences of social change. Its mission is to undertake world-class social science research on comparative studies of social change. The ISC studies migration processes as one of the central aspects in its research agenda.

The Institute is based in the Faculty of Humanities and involves staff from Schools across the Faculty. The overwhelming majority of the disciplines in the Faculty already have international reputations and the creation of the Faculty is proof of the single university’s commitment to, and ambitions for, these areas. The School of Social Sciences (SoSS) brings together six units including discipline areas of Economics, Government, Philosophy, Social Anthropology and Sociology, plus the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research (CCSR).

Role within the project

Dr. Laura Morales, member of the Institute for Social Change at the University of Manchester, is heading the work package on the demographics of migration, and is responsible for the collection and delivery of the Spanish study to the various work packages.

Involved members

Dr. Laura Morales is a Reader at the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Leicester. She was previously a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Change of the University of Manchester (until 2011), and before that taught at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2001-2003), Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2003), and the Universidad de Murcia. Her interests lie, especially, in the areas of electoral behaviour, political participation, and comparative politics. Among her most recent publications in English are: Associational Membership and Social Capital in Comparative Perspective: the Problem of Measurement, Politics and Society, 30 (1), 2002; “Associational Involvement” (with Peter Geurts) in Citizenship and Involvement in European Democracies: A Comparative Analysis van Deth, Jan W., José Ramón Montero, and Anders Westholm (Eds). London: Routledge, 2006. Between 2006 and 2008 she coordinated the project Multicultural Democracy and Immigrants’ Social Capital in Europe: Participation, Organisational Networks, and Public Policies at the Local Level (LOCALMULTIDEM), (funded by the 6th Framework Programme). Her book Joining Political Organisations was published by the ECPR Press in 2008.

Virginia Ros is PhD candidate at the University of Manchester. Her dissertation is entitled “A study of changes in attitudes towards immigrants in Spain”. Virginia has previously worked as a research assistant in the project Multicultural Democracy and Immigrants’ Social Capital in Europe: Participation, Organisational Networks, and Public Policies at the Local Level (LOCALMULTIDEM), funded by the 6th Framework Programme, and Democracia Cultural y Capital Social de los Inmigrantes (CAPSOCINMIG) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education. In 2009, she held an internship at the Centre for Sociological Research (CIS) where she focused her work on the attitudes towards immigration in Spain.