Finn Bell, Ph.D.

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. This project was featured on Stateside and WEMU, as well as in Concentrate and MLive. Dr. Bell is a founding member of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded Social Work Futures Lab.

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

Dr. Bell has presented his scholarship at the Society for Social Work Research (SSWR), the American Sociological Society (ASA), and the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), and his publications can be found in Journal of Community Practice, Qualitative Social Work, Social Work, and Affilia, among others.