Advanced Research Collaborative

About Our Awards
The Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) invites tenured and tenure-track scholars both within and outside of CUNY to apply for our Distinguished Faculty Awards. These scholars enter a stimulating interdisciplinary environment in which they conduct their own research, access the GC’s research centers and institutes, and collaborate with doctoral students and other leading scholars.
Broadly defined, the research areas are:
- Race, Migration, & Diversity
- Inequality
- Urbanism & Global Cities
- Comparative Studies
We are particularly interested in projects that can speak to both humanistic and social scientific concern.
Distinguished Awards fall into two categories:
Distinguished Visiting Scholars
For scholars who are not employed by the City University of New York. A Distinguished Visiting Scholar will receive an office, computer, and access to The Graduate Center’s academic infrastructure. Scholars can stay for one or two semesters, or for a shorter period. Depending on the duration of stay, travel costs to and from the fellowship can be reimbursed for the most economical fare only (up to maximum of $3,000) following the submission of the required documentation.
Distinguished CUNY Scholars
For tenured and tenure-track faculty at one of the campuses of the City University of New York, excluding central line faculty at the Graduate Center. A Distinguished CUNY Scholar will receive course buyouts up to a maximum of 3 course releases for one semester.
Our Events
ARC Spring 2022 Seminar Schedule
Our Director

Philip Kasinitz
Director, Advanced Research Collaborative
Presidential Professor, Sociology, International Migration Studies, Africana Studies
+1 212-817-8787
pkasinitz@gc.cuny.edu
Comments from Scholars
Upcoming Events
Recent News
Apr 6, 2022
Silvia Dapia Receives Inaugural Polish Studies Award for Book on Witold Gombrowicz
Her book examines the work and life of the Polish-born writer through a transnational lens.
- Faculty News
- GC Stories
Jun 22, 2021
‘POOR QUEER STUDIES’ BY PROFESSOR MATT BRIM EARNS WORKING-CLASS STUDIES ASSOCIATION AWARD
Poor Queer Studies describes how the field has been molded by wealthy, elitist institutions, leaving out students from working-class backgrounds and creating a set of ideas that is often irrelevant to them.
- Faculty News
May 28, 2021
Professor Marta Gutman Awarded the 2021 Catherine W. Bishir Prize
Gutman was recognized for her chapter in Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community.
May 14, 2021
ARC Student Scholar Publication: Christopher Maggio
Christopher Maggio, a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at The Graduate Center and former student scholar at the Advanced Research Collaborative, published "The Context of Immigrant Reception in the American South" in Social Currents, 2021.
- Student News
Recent Books
All ARC Books
The Battle Nearer to Home
The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City
Despite its image as an epicenter of progressive social policy, New York City continues to have one of the nation's most segregated school systems. Tracing the quest for integration in education from the mid-1950s to the present, The Battle Nearer to Home follows the tireless efforts by educational activists to dismantle the deep racial and socioeconomic inequalities that segregation reinforces. The fight for integration has shifted significantly over time, not least in terms of the way "integration" is conceived, from transfers of students and redrawing school attendance zones, to more recent demands of community control of segregated schools. In all cases, the Board eventually pulled the plug in the face of resistance from more powerful stakeholders, and, starting in the 1970s, integration receded as a possible solution to educational inequality. In excavating the history of New York City school integration politics, in the halls of power and on the ground, Christopher Bonastia unearths the enduring white resistance to integration and the severe costs paid by Black and Latino students. This last decade has seen activists renew the fight for integration, but the war is still far from won.
Published July 2022
Stanford University Press

Contested Concepts in Migration Studies
This volume demonstrates that migration- and diversity-related concepts are always contested, and provides a reflexive critical awareness and better comprehension of the complex questions driving migration studies. The main purpose of this volume is to enhance conceptual thinking on migration studies.
Examining interaction between concepts in the public domain, the academic disciplines, and the policy field, this book helps to avoid simplification or even trivialization of complex issues. Recent political events question established ways of looking at issues of migration and diversity and require a clarification or reinvention of political concepts to match the changing world. Applying five basic dimensions, each expert chapter contribution reflects on the role concepts play and demonstrates that concepts are ideology dependent, policy/politics dependent, context dependent, discipline dependent, and language dependent, and are influenced by how research is done, how policies are formulated, and how political debates extend and distort them.
This book will be essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners in migration studies/politics, migrant integration, citizenship studies, racism studies, and more broadly of key interest to sociology, political science, and political theory.
Current ARC Scholar, Ricard Zapata-Barrero, is Full Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
Dirk Jacobs is Full Professor at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, and Chairperson of the Brussels Studies Institute, Belgium.
Riva Kastoryano is Emerite Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), affiliated at Sciences Po - Center for International Studies (CERI-Sciences Po, Paris).
Published April 2022
Routledge, 2022

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing
Andrew Ross
Today, a minimum-wage earner can afford a one-bedroom apartment in only 145 out of 3,143 counties in America. One of the very worst places in the United States to look for affordable housing is Osceola County, Florida. Once the main approach to Disney World, where vacationers found lodging on their way to the Magic Kingdom, the 15-mile Route 192 corridor in Osceola has become a site of shocking contrasts. At one end, global investors snatch up foreclosed properties and park their capital in extravagant vacation homes for affluent visitors, eliminating the county's affordable housing in the process. At the other, underpaid tourist industry workers, displaced families, and disabled and elderly people subsisting on government checks cram themselves into dilapidated, roach-infested motels, or move into tent camps in the woods. Through visceral, frontline reporting from the motels and encampments dotting central Florida, renowned social analyst Andrew Ross exposes the overlooked housing crisis sweeping America's suburbs and rural areas, where residents suffer ongoing trauma, poverty, and nihilism. As millions of renters face down evictions and foreclosures in the midst of the COVID-19 recession, Andrew Ross reveals how ineffective government planning, property market speculation, and poverty wages have combined to create this catastrophe. Urgent and incisive, Sunbelt Blues offers original insight into what is quickly becoming a full-blown national emergency.
Ross, professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and a social activist, was a previous ARC Distinguished Scholar.
Published October 2021
Metropolitan Books, 2021