Growing up in Seattle, Christopher Lee listened to hip hop, but, he says, the lyrics didn’t hit home.

“I was leading a kind of a sheltered life. I was not exposed to urban problems. Many of us take inequality and division for granted. People don’t stop and think, ‘why do we have ghettos?’ said Lee.

That changed when Lee arrived at Temple. He had originally applied to East Coast schools because he felt he was ready for something different. Being in the middle of a large postindustrial city gave Lee exactly what he was looking for and transformed his outlook.

As a freshman, Lee didn’t know what he wanted to major in until he took a course called “Race, Class and Gender in the City,” offered by the Department of Geography and Urban Studies, in the College of Liberal Arts, in order to fulfill a requirement.

“While taking that class I began to ask, ‘how do people get pushed to the fringes of society?’” Lee said.

During a semester abroad in Barcelona, Lee pursued this line of thinking. Upon his return to Temple, he worked with Geography and Urban Studies Professor Benjamin Kohl to develop a research proposal on immigrant neighborhoods that would allow him to return overseas.

“I assumed he would conduct his research in Barcelona, but instead Chris announced that he would like to do his project in Sweden, where he had family, and where the dynamics in immigrant neighborhoods are different than those found here or in Paris or Barcelona,” said Kohl.

With funding from a Diamond Scholar research award, Lee undertook a highly ambitious project to apply Loic Wacquant’s framework of urban marginality to immigrant neighborhoods in Stockholm and Uppsala, where he conducted eight weeks of fieldwork, interviewing a range of actors.

“My research showed that discrimination, exclusion and resentment can persist in spite of social welfare protections,” Lee said. “Strong social protections alone will fail to avert the emergence of marginality unless guided by well-designed coherent immigration, housing, labor and city planning policies.”

In the future, Lee hopes to study city planning and architecture and use his background to bridge the increasing divides emerging in cities.