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  • Sociology PhD

PhD in Sociology | PhD in Social Policy | PhD in Social Work

The University of Brighton fosters a range of research associated with Sociology and related social sciences including research into Social policy and Social work, and is also well-placed to develop cross-disciplinary projects with subjects that make use of sociological practices and methodologies.

Our Sociology PhD students are based within the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton’s Falmer campus. Sociology is a vibrant and stimulating programme of study, with lecturers engaged with diverse sociological issues such as health, mobilities, teenage pregnancy and parenthood, the life course, gender, migration, outer space, and classed identities.

Our expertise also covers areas of research into Social policy and Social work, both of which welcome approaches for supervision.

As a Sociology PhD student you will become a member of one or more of the university’s Centres of Research and Enterprise Excellence (COREs) or Research and Enterprise Groups (REGs), with opportunities for support and networking beyond your primary supervision.

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 ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Programme. 

Employment opportunities with a Sociology PhD include academic posts as lecturers and postdoctoral research assistants at the University of Brighton and elsewhere, as well as roles in central and local government, non-governmental organisations, social research, teaching, journalism and the media.

Apply to 'social Science' in the applicant portal

Apply with us for funding from the ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Programme

Key information

As a sociology student at Brighton, you will benefit from:

  • a supervisory team comprising two or sometimes three members of academic staff. Depending on your research specialism you may also have an additional supervisor from another school, another research institution, or an external partner from government or industry.  
  • desk space and access to a computer in a space specifically designed for research students. There are a range of facilities on the Falmer site include various catering options.
  • 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 Falmer Library and other campus libraries.  
  • SASS has state-of-the-art research facilities in Watson Building and you will have access to the Creative Methods Lab on the first floor, including access to specialist technical support.

Academic environment

The School of Humanities and Social Science provides a vibrant environment for doctoral study, with opportunities to work with leading researchers in your field and to make use of our excellent research facilities. It has a range of expertise in co-designed and creative research methodologies and methods, including work with older people, children, LGBT communities, Afghan migrants and those affected by chronic health conditions. We also carry out renowned research on social movements, gun control, sexualities and complexity in public policy.

We have nurtured partnerships with a range of organisations, locally nationally and internationally. For example, collaborative research into emotional and mental health is carried out with Sussex Partnership Trust and work on digital healthcare with Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals Trust and the Brighton and Sussex Medical School and clinical sites across five European countries. International collaborations include the Ageing and Communication Technologies International Partnership (ACT) on generational engagements with digital technologies and research on sensory engagements with space with universities in Finland and Slovenia (SENSOTRA). Our research attracts funding from AHRC, ESRC, Wellcome Trust, NIHR, ERC Horizon 2020, Alzheimer’s Society, the Independent Social Research Foundation and others.

As a Sociology PhD student, you will become an integral member of the School of Humanities and Social Science, contributing to the school’s research culture as well as joining its rapidly expanding and active group of research students. The school offers a range of social and research events and activities, including the Social Science Forum, a fortnightly opportunity for researchers to share their work and contribute to the development of each other’s research, an annual ‘Festival of Social Science’ for social scientists and their collaborators across the university, and an annual Social Science Public Lecture which is included in the Brighton Festival Fringe programme.

Researchers work collaboratively across three research groups in addressing challenges of social, health, psychological, spatial, and environmental injustice, seeking to transform policy and practice on global and more local scales.

Academic staff in the School of Humanities and Social Science have expertise in a range of research topics and research methodologies. Within this department of the school we work primarily in these Research and Enterprise Groups:

  • Care, Health and Emotional Wellbeing REG
  • Cities, Injustice and Resistance REG

In addition, researchers in SASS work in the cross-university Centres of Research and Enterprise Excellence (CORES) including:

  • Centre for Digital Media Cultures
  • Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics
  • Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender.

Supervisory interests

 

Profile photo for Dr Matthew Adams

Dr Matthew Adams

Dr Adams supervises PhD students addressing a range of topics including mental health and distress, social and cultural identity, critical psychologies of climate change, climate activism, nature-connection, Anthropocene studies, nature-based interventions, human-animal relations and posthumanities. He is especially interested in supervising students adopting qualitative methodological and critical theoretical approaches. Interdisciplinary projects are especially welcome. 

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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. 

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Dr Apurv Chauhan

I welcome doctoral research ideas related to:

  • poverty, homelessness, deprivation, and social inequalities
  • social representations; risk and trust in social world and healthcare; perspectives on vaccines (including hesitancy and refusal); public understanding of science
  • Using big-data for psychological research

Interested students are encouraged to send a short email to me with their initial ideas.

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Dr Mark Doidge

I'm interested in supervising anyone for PhD or MRes 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

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Dr Kyla Ellis-Sloan

I am currently on the supervision team for Vanessa Stone De Guzman on her thesis, 'Out and about with my disabled child: The lived experience of parents of children with Down Syndrome'. 

I would be interested in supervising projects on motherhood, teenage pregnancy, fatherhood, parenting or related areas. 

 
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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. 

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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.

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Dr Lambros Fatsis

I would be delighted to receive proposals for doctoral studies in my areas of expertise as listed below:

  • Cultural and Critical Criminology
  • Criminalisation of Black/Afro-diasporic music(s)
  • Police racism
  • Black British history and subcultures (especially soundsystem culture)
  • Sociology of public and intellectual life
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Prof Angie Hart

Students drawn to studying with me are generally people with a commitment to social change. All of them share my passion for researching resilience-related topics and most of their studies involve some form of co-production with communities, policymakers or practitioners. Many of them also volunteer for our social enterprise Boingboing and there are loads of opportunities in our CRSJ for students to get involved in some fabulous personal development activities, for example attending conferences on behalf of our Centre, being on the Management Group, staffing a stand at international events, etc.

Prospective supervisory topics I get excited about include:Co-productive and resilience-based approaches to tackling social and environmental issues including:Child, family and adult mental healthPractitioner stress and burnoutSchools practicesHigher Education community-university partnership practices.

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Dr Laura Harvey

I have supervised two PhDs to completion and regularly supervise undergraduate dissertation projects. I welcome applications for PhD research from students interested in gender, sexuality, youth cultures, media representations, the place of media in everyday life, discourse analysis, diary research and creative methodologies. 

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Dr Helen Johnson

Helen supervises PhD and MD students with an interest in arts-based interventions in healthcare, education and wellbeing, and/or the use of creative, arts-based research methods.  She is interested in talking to doctoral applicants who are interested in researching creativity and the arts, with foci including: art therapy; arts interventions for health and wellbeing, including invisible chronic and contested conditions; social prescribing; creativity and the lived experience of dementia; arts education; spoken word and poetry slam; art worlds/communities; arts inclusivity; everyday creativity; and the artistic process.   She is also interested in supervising students who wish to work with creative, arts-based and/or participatory methods, including: poetic inquiry; autoethnography; photo voice; photo elicitation; collaborative poetics; and participatory action research.  Helen currently supervises four doctoral candidates, who are researching: the lived experiences of women with borderline personality disorder (including creative coping strategies); neurologic music therapy with young people with juvenille dementia; black people's experiences of intimacy and psychosis; and decolonial praxis in museum learning.  She has previously supervised and examined work covering topics that include: perceptions of frailty in the undergraduate medical curriculum; the impact of austerity policies on homeless people; spoken word with young offenders in a Macedonian prison; the performance and perception of authenticiy in contemporary UK spoken word poetry; and NHS staff experiences of work.

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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.

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Dr Sarah Leaney

I am interested in supervising doctoral students in classed inequalities, urban sociology, social housing and ethnographic methodologies.

I am currently supervising the following projects:

Social and cultural exclusion through seaside gentrification on the south coast Bethan Prosser

Precarious practices and policies in the divided ‘smart city’ Matthew Smith

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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.

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Dr James Ormrod

I am interested in supervising doctoral research in the areas of outer space studies, environmental sociology, human-animal studies, and social movement studies, as well as work more broadly situated within psychosocial studies.

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Dr Natalie Pitimson

I am interested in supervising doctoral students in the areas of death, dying and grief, as well as the sociology of the internet and online methodologies. 

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Dr James Ravenhill

I am interested in supervising student projects in LGBT+ health and wellbeing, and in gay, bisexual, and trans masculinities. I would act as co-supervisor on projects in other areas that use Discourse Analysis, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, and mixed methods. 

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Dr Raphael Schlembach

Raphael is interested in receiving proposals for doctoral studies in his areas of expertise, including critical approaches to:

  • protest and social movements
  • criminal justice and social policy
  • migration and citizenship
  • policing and security
  • nationalism and the far right
  • critical and democratic theory

For current funding opportunities see: http://www.southcoastdtp.ac.uk/apply/

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Dr Rebecca Searle

Rebecca supervises students researching contemporary British History. She has particular expertise in the history of housing, the politics of property, the history of sexuality and the impact of war on society. She works with students across social, political, cultural and economic history and with students specialising in politics, sociology or philosophy who want to incorporate historical analysis into their research. 

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Dr Laetitia Zeeman

Supervision support can be provided to PhD students who are interested in queer theory, poststructuralism, the application of critical social theory, new materialism, intersectionality and feminist theory in health-related research. Focus areas include LGBTQ+ health and healthcare, resilience, trans health and mental health promotion. PhD students she has supervised to completion have worked on studies employing critical social theories and qualitative creative methods. She has examined PhD/Professional Doctorate studies in the UK and further afield.  

Current PhD students 

  • H Howitt, Mike Phillips, Esther Omotola Ayoola, Amy Middleton, Aile Trumm 

Former PhD students

  • Kim Brown, Tracey Harding, Adam Kincel, Jens Schneider

 

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 subsistence 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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