Finn McLafferty Bell, PhD, MSW

Assistant Professor, University of Michigan-Dearborn; Curator, Ypsi Farmers & Gardeners Oral History Project

Finn McLafferty Bell is an assistant professor of human services at the College of Education, Health, and Human Services, University of Michigan-Dearborn. He received his PhD in Social Work and Sociology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his Masters in Social Work at the University of Denver.

Dr. Bell’s community-engaged, qualitative research is motivated by the overarching question of how communities can cultivate the emotional, spiritual, cultural, and material resources needed to face the climate crisis. This inquiry has led him to interviewing workers and sisters about how they cope while working on a farm at a Catholic eco-justice center, as well as interviewing working class and/or Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) food growers in Ypsilanti about how growing food helps them to build resilience to an environment that is not only changing because of the climate, but also because of gentrification. This latter project has grown into the Ypsi Farmers & Gardeners Oral History Project, a publicly available digital archive housed at the Ypsilanti District Library that helps us to learn from the past to envision the possibilities for a more just future.

Dr. Bell’s research interests and twelve years of experience as a social work practitioner inform his teaching, which focuses on anti-oppressive, anti-racist, and anti-colonial social work theories and practice.

Contact

Email: fmcbell@umich.edu

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=whMvzF8AAAAJ&hl=en