Dr James Laurence is a post-doctoral research fellow at University of Manchester. He recently completed his PhD exploring whether community ethnic diversity has a negative effect on indicators of local ‘social cohesion’ at Oxford University. During this period he wrote a report for the UK Department of Communities and Local Government on the predictors of ‘social cohesion’, worked as a consultant for the Birmingham Strategic Partnership on the relationship between diversity and social cohesion, and collaborated on the ‘Managing Cultural Diversity’ project at Oxford. He is currently working on a project analysing the social effects of recessions for a joint Manchester-Harvard University collaboration.