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  • Human geography PhD

Human geography PhD

For the last two decades, the University of Brighton has made significant contributions to research into key social, political and environmental concerns that constitute twenty-first-century lives. From investigating spaces of authority, activism and protest, to examining embodied politics and practices of access, property rights and citizenship, our human geography staff and PhD students are leading research at the intersections of society, space and environment.

Much of our work takes a critical approach to grounded and material realities and seeks to define and address a range of transformative agendas. Research by human geography-focused staff and PhD students in our Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics and our Society, Space and Environment Research and Enterprise Group is being used, for example, to examine sexual and gendered inequalities and liveabilities, biopolitics and migration, affect theory, deindustrialisation, emergent theorisations of the commons in relation to new social movements, and political ecologies of enclosure and resource extractivism across a range of geographical contexts.

Recent and current PhD students have been successful in obtaining studentships covering both fees and living costs through the University of Brighton’s involvement in the AHRC Techne Doctoral Training Programme and the ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Programme. 

Our Human Geography PhD students have gone on to a variety of different roles following the successful completion of their research. These include academic posts as lecturers and postdoctoral research assistants at the University of Brighton and elsewhere, plus research roles in, for example, the water industry. Many have gone on to management positions in related areas such as directing an events and education not-for-profit consultancy focused on global citizenship and diversity, working with funding agencies in the UK and internationally.

Apply to 'environment' in the applicant portal

Apply with us for funding through the ESRC South Coast  Doctoral Training Partnership

Key information

As a human geography PhD student at Brighton, you will benefit from:

  • a supervisory team comprising two or three members of expert academic staff. Depending on your research specialism, you may also have an additional supervisor from the , or another research institution or external partner.
  • desk space and access to a desktop PC, usually in one of the postgraduate offices on the sixth floor of the award-winning Cockcroft Building. You will additionally benefit from access to a range of electronic resources via the university’s Online Library, as well as to the physical book and journal collections housed within the Aldrich Library and other campus libraries.
  • The Brighton Doctoral College, which offers a training programme for postgraduate researchers, covering research methods and transferable (including employability) skills. Attendance at appropriate modules within this programme is encouraged, as is contribution to the School’s fortnightly seminar series and research centre/group activities. Academic and technical staff also provide more subject-specific training.

Academic environment

The close relationship between human geographers in the School of Applied Sciences and staff in cognate areas of the University including the School of Humanities and Social Science,  the School of Art and Media, and the School of Sport and Health Sciences, provide an ideal home for research across the breadth of human geography.

We provide PhD students with opportunities to work with leading scholars in diverse areas that examine spaces, power and justice across the spectrum of human geography. Our interdisciplinary supervisory teams enable students to undertake research that straddles traditional disciplinary boundaries and incorporates, for example, philosophy, queer theory, politics, anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, history and cultural studies.

We look forward to hearing from human geography PhD applicants, particularly where there is an intersection with our major areas of specialism:

  • Biopower, borders and security
  • Cultural and political geography
  • Economic anthropology and economic geography
  • Embodiment, affect, performance and process
  • Environmental futures and sustainability
  • Geographies of development
  • Geographies of finance
  • Geographies of gender, sexes and sexualities
  • Geographies of racism
  • Geographies of sport and leisure
  • Methods in human geography
  • Political ecology
  • Power and place
  • Spaces, power and justice

More detail about our areas of specialism is provided under the following Research Centre and Group pages:

  • Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics
  • Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories
  • Society, Space and Environment Research and Enterprise Group
  • Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender 

Some of our supervisors

Profile photo for Dr Daniel Burdsey

Dr Daniel Burdsey

I am interested in supervising doctoral students in all areas related to my research interests in sociological, cultural and geographical analyses of race, ethnicity and popular culture. In particular, my work addresses: the experiences of British Asians in sport and leisure; social and cultural aspects of the contemporary English seaside and coast, especially the connections between race, whiteness, migration and ‘new’ spaces of multiculture; theorising race and racism in football, with particular focus on connecting ideas around Empire, de/coloniality, racialised identities and anti-racist resistance; and Black British leisure and musical cultures and spaces.

My current PhD students are undertaking research on the experiences of bisexual women in sport, the use of trauma-sensitive yoga with refugee women, Islam and the 2022 men's FIFA World Cup in Qatar, gentrification at the English seaside, and tourism in post-Communist Romania. 

Profile photo for Dr Alex Channon

Dr Alex Channon

I am able to supervise doctoral research across the fields of sociology, cultural studies, and politics as they pertain to sport, physical education, fitness, and related fields. However, I am particularly interested in sociological studies of the following specialist topics:

  • Martial arts and combat sports
  • Sport-related violence
  • Risk, injury and medical care in sport
  • Consent in sport
Profile photo for Dr Mark Doidge

Dr Mark Doidge

I'm interested in supervising anyone with a passion for critically examining sport or fandom. With my expertise and networks across Europe, I would love to supervise projects on range of topics around political mobilisation, collective behaviour and community engagement in the world of sport (and football in particular). Topics could include: 

Sport's impact on climate change

Sport and Leisure in the lives of refugees and asylum seekers

Mental health and fandom

Football fandom across Europe – including ultras, away fan experiences, political movements

Political activism amongst football fans, including anti-racism and anti-discrimination, environmentalism or community engagement.

Sport and Hate Crime

Profile photo for Prof Rebecca Elmhirst

Prof Rebecca Elmhirst

I am currently supervising four PhD students, two of whom are part of a H2020 Marie Curie Sklodowska Innovative Training Network. I am interested in supervising MRes and doctoral projects relating to (feminist) political ecology, and in particular, projects that relate to social and environmental justice, climate and agrarian resource extractivism, decolonial thinking and critical approaches to sustainable development. 

Profile photo for Dr Mark Erickson

Dr Mark Erickson

I supervise students across a range of social science disciplines, although my main discipline is sociology.  I am interested in supervising projects in sociology of science and technology / science and technology studies, sociology of work and employment, social theory. Projects I currently supervise are researching science and technology, work and employment, climate change / emergency, communing / the commons, trade union studies, gender and design, children and migration, and mental health.

Applications to the following proposal are very welcome: Managing science: workers and management in the replication and reproduction of scientific knowledge

Despite Wajcman’s exhortation for management studies and science studies to combine to understand science and technology better (1) there has been very little collaboration or cross fertilization between these two areas of social science in the past two decades. Studies of the working practices of professional, academic scientists are rare, despite the importance of these workers in the knowledge economy, and there is little understanding of the relationship between HR practices, labour process and scientific knowledge production and reproduction.

This project will use a management studies perspective to consider a contemporary ‘crisis’ in formal science. The crisis of reproducibility – the inability for one research team to replicate the results obtained by another research team – has received considerable attention in the scientific press in recent years (2, 3). A recent survey in Nature found that 50% of scientists have failed to reproduce one of their own experiments (4).

This problem threatens to undermine public confidence in scientific expertise and opinion, a very major problem given the legitimised discourse of climate change denial (5). The project will investigate the management of scientists involved in knowledge production work, and will examine the labour process surrounding knowledge production (6, 7). It will consider whether it is constraints of work, managerial and institutional imperatives (8), an instrumental orientation to career (9), and a ‘publish or perish’ culture (10) that are barriers to replication and factors in low reproducibility rates.

This research will address these issues from a combined management studies and sociology of work perspective. In particular the research will consider the relationship between the construction of occupational identities, managerial control of work time and the decision making processes that take place inside work teams regarding identification of experiments to replicated and / or reproduced (10). The project will adopt a qualitative approach, including semi-structured interviews and an ethnography, and documentary analysis deployed across a range of disciplines and trans-disciplines.

Research questions

1. How is the academic science labour process organised, managed and resisted?

2. How do teams of scientists in different disciplines decide on replication experiments and how is this work allocated?

3. What is the role of reproducibility/ replication in the formation of occupational identities by academic scientists?

References

1. Wajcman, J. (2006) 'New connections: social studies of science and technology and studies of work', Work, Employment and Society, 20, 4, 773-786. 2. Harris, R. (2017) Rigor Mortis. How sloppy science, worthless cures, crushes hope and wastes billions, New York: Basic Books. 3. Freedman, L.P., et al (2015) 'The Economics of Reproducibility in Preclinical Research', PLoS Biol, 13, 6. 4. Baker, M. (2016) ‘Is there a reproducibility crisis? Nature 533, 452–454 (26 May 2016)  5. Makri, A. (2017) ‘Give the public the tools to trust scientists’ Nature 541, 261 (19 January 2017)  6. Thompson, P. (1983) The Nature of Work.  An introduction to debates on the labour process, London: Macmillan. 7. Thompson, P. and Ackroyd, P. (1995) 'All quiet on the workplace front?', Sociology, 29, 4, 615-633. 8. Bradley, H., Erickson, M., Stephenson, C. and Williams, S. (2000) Myths at work, Cambridge: Polity.  9. Erickson, M., Bradley, H., Stephenson, C. and Williams, S. (2009) Business in society: people, work and organizations, Cambridge: Polity 10. Erickson, M. (2015) Science, culture and society: understanding science in the twenty-first century. 2nd edition, Cambridge: Polity.

Profile photo for Dr Mary Gearey

Dr Mary Gearey

I am interested in supervising postgraduate research students (PhDs and MRes) in the following areas: community led water resource governance; sustainable water futures; elder environmental activism; nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation, degrowth theory in relation to environmental citizenship.

Profile photo for Dr Paul Gilchrist

Dr Paul Gilchrist

I would be interested in supervising postgraduate students in the following areas:

- Geographies of sport and leisure- Playful cities and urban everyday life- Community-supported agriculture / community gardening

I also welcome discussions on other potential topics.

Profile photo for Dr Jason Lim

Dr Jason Lim

I am interested in supervising PhD students in the following areas: critical race theory, de/post-colonial studies, feminist activism, sexualities, trans studies, political philosophy, history of ontology.

Profile photo for Dr Catherine Kelly

Dr Catherine Kelly

I welcome the opportunity to supervise PhD students with an interest in the areas of tourism and wellbeing, place and wellbeing, sustainability, nature-based tourism, coastal tourism, blue spaces, water and wellbeing, rural tourism, cultural/heritage tourism, national parks and biospheres.

Profile photo for Dr Nichola Khan

Dr Nichola Khan

I am interested in supervising students in the interdisciplinary areas of migration, war, conflict, violence, refugees, transnationalism, ethnicity, mobilities, cities, migrant health and mental health, social inequalities, and environmental violence- particularly those working on Pakistan, Afghanistan, and migrant populations in Asia and Europe. My past and present students also work on very different kinds of topic, including around race and sexuality, autophenomenography and psychotherapy, childrens violence to parents, climate-induced migration as an emergent political and policy field, adolescent refugee mental health, female genital mutilation in Southern England, honour based violence and the British police, trans lives in Bolivia, refugee women and yoga in Sweden- and postdoctoral research on peacemaking in the Basque country.

Profile photo for Dr Nicholas McGlynn

Dr Nicholas McGlynn

I'm interested in supervising postgrad projects in (but not limited to) the following areas: sexual politics outside the metropolis; social and cultural geographies of fat men; Participatory Action Research with LGBTQ communities; and Bear subcultures and spaces.

Profile photo for Dr Douglas McNaughton

Dr Douglas McNaughton

Political economy of television production. Aesthetics and narrative in television. Historical development of British television. Representations of space, place and identities in British screen cultures. Science fiction, fantasy and horror, in particular, British folk horror. Telefantasy, world cinema, screen technologies, the sociology of space. Screen acting and performance.

Profile photo for Prof Lesley Murray

Prof Lesley Murray

I am interested in supervising doctoral students on a range of topics including transport and mobilities, urban sociology, visual sociology and gender and generation. In addition, I welcome proposals from students seeking to adopt creative and inventive methodologies and methods. I am currently supervising projects on: lived experiences of the anthropocene; urban place-attachment across generations; sequential art in architectural practice; urban pocket parks; generation and automobility futures; and the wellbeing of refugee children.

Profile photo for Prof Marina Novelli

Prof Marina Novelli

Marina’s PhD supervisory interests are closely aligned with her research interest and experience. These include:

- Sustainable Tourism Development for Resilient Communities - i.e. the complexity of tourism development in the Golbal South; niche (tourism) product development; the impact of heath crisis on tourism communities (Ebola, COVID); healthy lifestyle tourism development and managemeent; Local, National and IDOs' interventions for sustainability and resilient communities;  travel philanthropy, serious leisure and the act of giving beyond volunteering;

- Innovation, responsible entrepreneurship and sustainability in tourism - community-based and responsible tourism approaches; circular economy, contemporary arts and community development, contemporary arts for sustainable development in Africa; rural diversification and regeneration through tourism.

- Policy, Planning and Governance - i.e. master-planning; training needs analysis and capacity building; responsible leadership; participatory and community cetred development; capacity building processes and practices; overtourism and tourismophobia; tourism and the circular economy.

Profile photo for Dr Tijana Rakic

Dr Tijana Rakic

Tijana is an experienced PhD supervisor and examiner and welcomes informal enquiries from potential PhD applicants who are interested in topics and methodological approaches related to her research interests, projects and publications.

These include but are not limited to the PhD research project ideas which propose to rely on visual and creative qualitative research methods and/or are related to the themes of heritage, tourism and national identity studies; travel, tourism and art; and representations of places, cultures and identities in promotional materials and popular media. 

Tijana is currently supervising 5 PhD research projects: 

  • Ms Marineli Codin, working title: Constructing and Projecting National Identity in Post-Communist Romania: a Longitudinal Analysis of Tourism Promotional Materials from 1990 until 2020 (research degree study on-going, Lead Supervisor) 
  • Ms Katharina Buerger, working title: Conflicts, Protest and Resistance to (Modern) Olympic Games (research degree study on-going, Lead Supervisor) 
  • Ms Lorarine Ojukwu Odumegwu Ojukwu, working title: Representation of Black Women: the Case of Tourism Promotional Materials for Namibia from 2016 to 2021 (research degree study on-going, Second Supervisor) 
  • Ms Matea Hanžek, working title: Post-Conflict Destination Branding and National Identity Construction: a Discourse Analysis of Croatia’s Official Tourism Promotional Materials (research degree study on-going, Lead Supervisor) 
  • Mr Brendan Downing, working title: Construction of Greeknes in the Travels and Artwork of Fred Boissonnas (research degree study on-going, external co-supervisor, National College of Art and Design, Ireland)
Profile photo for Dr Clare Weeden

Dr Clare Weeden

I am an experienced PhD supervisor, and welcome enquiries from potential candidates interested in these and similar areas within the nexus of ethics, tourism, consumer behaviour, marketing and critical cruise studies.

 

For further supervisory staff including cross-disciplinary options, please visit research staff on our research website. 

Making an application

You will apply to the University of Brighton through our online application portal. When you do, you will require a research proposal, references, a personal statement and a record of your education.

You will be asked whether you have discussed your research proposal and your suitability for doctoral study with a member of the University of Brighton staff. We recommend that all applications are made with the collaboration of at least one potential supervisor. Approaches to potential supervisors can be made directly through the details available online. If you are unsure, please do contact the Doctoral College for advice.

Please visit our How to apply for a PhD page for detailed information.

Sign in to our online application portal to begin.

Fees and funding 

Funding

Undertaking research study will require university fees as well as support for your research activities and plans for subsistance during full or part-time study.

Funding sources include self-funding, funding by an employer or industrial partners; there are competitive funding opportunities available in most disciplines through, for example, our own university studentships or national (UK) research councils. International students may have options from either their home-based research funding organisations or may be eligible for some UK funds.

Learn more about the funding opportunities available to you.

Tuition fees academic year 2022–23

Standard fees are listed below, but may vary depending on subject area. Some subject areas may charge bench fees/consumables; this will be decided as part of any offer made. Fees for UK and international/EU students on full-time and part-time courses are likely to incur a small inflation rise each year of a research programme.

MPhil/PhD
 Full-timePart-time

UK

£4,596 

£2,298

International (including EU)

£15,282 

£7,641

International students registered in the School of Humanities and Social Science or in the School of Business and Law

£13,464 

£6,732


PhD by Publication
Full-time Part-time
 N/A  £2,298 (UK)

Contact Brighton Doctoral College

To contact the Doctoral College at the University of Brighton we request an email in the first instance. Please visit our contact the Brighton Doctoral College page.

For supervisory contact, please see individual profile pages.

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