Research in the Faculty of Social Sciences

The Faculty of Social Sciences is engaged in world-class research which informs both academic and public debate about the key issues facing societies today:

• one current project Oecumene: Citizenship after Orientalism, funded by the European Research Council, is looking at how citizenship is being rethought in an increasingly globalised Europe;
• while another, Enduring Love?, funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council, is exploring how couples sustain long-term relationships.

We are committed to work that is both interdisciplinary and critical. We have a strong track record of methodological elaboration and innovation, including in discourse analysis, Q-methodology and visual methodologies, and an interest in the social and political lives of methods.

We strive to be engaged with important social issues, to be relevant to people's lives and to promote values of equality and social justice.

We collaborate with each other through our Research Centres, and we also nurture strong relations with non-academic partners.

Our areas of research

Research Centres

• Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) for research and debate on citizenship, families, publics and the psychosocial.
  
• International Centre for Comparative Criminological Research (ICCCR) for work on justice, police and prison ethnography, and forensic psychology.
  
• IKD: Innovation, Knowledge and Development for research on innovation, finance and development.
• OpenSpace Research Centre for work on urban and cultural geographies, and for environmental research.
• ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC) explores how social and economic differences are expressed through various cultural activities like the media, sport and religion.
  

Departments within the Faculty of Social Sciences

• Economics
• Geography
• Politics & International Studies
• Psychology in the Social Sciences
• Sociology
• Social Policy and Criminology

And finally, you can also get to know some of us through our blogs: for example, Clive Barnett and Nick Mahony blog on publics and politics, Simon Carter's blog discusses all things health-related, Joe Smith discusses the cultural politics of environmental change and Gillian Rose blogs on visual culture and visual methods.

Postgraduate research

If you are interested in studying for a PhD in the Faculty of Social Sciences, please visit our postgraduate research pages.