Michael Keith

Co-Director

Michael Keith is Professor at COMPAS, University of Oxford, Director of the PEAK Urban Research programme, co-ordinator of Urban Transformations (The ESRC portfolio of investments and research on cities), and co-Director of the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities. He was the Director of COMPAS until recently, a position that he held for over a decade.

His research focuses on migration related processes of urban change. His most recent work is the monograph China Constructing Capitalism: Economic Life and Urban Change (2014). His next will be a book for Cambridge University Press, entitled: Power, Identity and Representation: Race, Governance and Mobilisation in British Society (with Les Back and John Solomos).

He has experience outside the academy working in the community and voluntary sector and as a politician for twenty years in the east end of London, working initially in organisations focusing on racism and the criminal justice system and more recently as the co-founder and chair of the Rich Mix Cultural Foundation, a major cross cultural arts centre in Bethnal Green.