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Ben Crow is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Education
Crow has a Bachelors degree in Civil Engineering from the Polytechnic of Central London, awarded in 1970. He has a PhD from Edinburgh University awarded in 1980.

Political activism
After completing his degree in Civil Engineering, Crow began a career as a Transport Planner in London. However he felt dissatisfied with his "cushioned life in Britain" and turned to political activism.

Operation Omega
Crow was one of the founding activists of Operation Omega, a group that took food aid into East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) during the 1971 Bangladesh genocide. He was arrested by the Pakistan Army and briefly jailed. He and the other members of his team went on hunger strike before they were formally charged with "carrying subversive literature" into the country. They were tried and then deported to India.

The Big Red Band
In 1982, after a trip to Pakistan, Crow returned to London and, inspired by the experiences of marching bands at CND marches in the late 1970s, he and Trevor Heath formed the Big Red Band, a socialist brass band that supported pro-nuclear disarmament and anti-war marches and the Miner's Strike in 1984 and 1985. The band played an "avowedly and recognisably internationalist repertoire, a musical statement of its members’ political sympathies which would be understood by its core audience at leftist demonstrations". Amongst other members of the Big Red Band was the father of actress Saffron Burrows and Christopher Barker, later of the Campaign for Better Transport Crow left the band in 1990.

The Open University
After completing his PhD, Crow taught at the Open University in the UK, where he was a Lecturer in the Department of Development Studies.

University of Santa Cruz
In 1990, Crow moved to California to pursue his academic career. He initially taught at Stanford University and Berkeley, before joining the Department of Economics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In he moved to the Sociology department, first as an Assistant Professor, then later being promoted to a full professorship. Between 2011 and 2014, Crow was the Chair of the Sociology Department.

Crow's academic work focuses on issues of water access and equality, with a particular focus on Water access and gender. His work is widely cited in the field. Crow "conceptualizes water access as essential to the urban poor's wellbeing, and thus their ability to live lives of dignity and value". He provides a standard definition of water deprivation in his 2001 book "Water: Gender and Material Inequalities in the Global South ".

His "Atlas of Global Inequalities", published in 2016, is used in university Sociology courses, and is widely cited.