Professor Ben Baumberg Geiger

Ben is currently a Professor in Social Science and Health in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King's College London, and co-leads the 'Work, welfare reform and mental health' programme within the ESRC Centre for Society & Mental Health.  He is also co-lead of the 'Welfare at a (Social) Distance' project, an ESRC rapid-response project looking at the benefits system during Covid-19 (with the final outputs coming out later in 2023). 

Until July 2022, Ben was a Reader in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Kent, where he helped co-found the University of Kent's Q-Step centre. For a time in 2015-16 he was also on secondment as a Policy Advisor at the Department of Work and Pensions.

His personal website is available at https://www.benbgeiger.co.uk/, and a full list of publications is available from http://www.benbgeiger.co.uk/publications.htm

Research Interests

He has a wide range of research interests, currently focused on:

• Disability, the workplace and benefits (see Disability page)
• Attitudes to benefits and ‘scroungers’ (see Social Attitudes page)
• Philosophy of social science, including credibility, trustworthiness, lived experience (see On Social Science page).
• Research methods (both quant and qual)

Research Groups

Ben co-leads the ‘Work, welfare reform and mental health’ programme within the ESRC Centre for Society & Mental Health.

Teaching

7SSHM504 Quantitative Data Analysis

7SSHM507 Data Manipulation and Management

Expertise and Public Engagement

Ben has done public engagement work with lots of different audiences:

• With policymakers: Ben worked on secondment at DWP in 2015-16, and continues to have regular meetings with DWP as well as other official bodies like the OBR, Audit Office, Parliamentary Select Committees etc.
• With the general public: Ben led the blog Inequalities for several years from 2010, and has written for e.g. the Guardian (a full list of non-academic publications is available here).
• With others: Ben regularly speaks to charities like Mind that are members of the Disability Benefits Consortium, and claimant- or disabled-person led groups such as the Committee on Social Security led by Experts by Experience, Chronic Illness Inclusion and Disability Rights UK.