Overview

The Centre for Public Policy Research (CPPR) welcomes applications for the PhD in Interdisciplinary Policy Studies. The MPhil/PhD programme offers you the chance to undertake a critical piece of research that is worthy of publication and which makes an original contribution to interdisciplinary social science and policy studies.

The Centre is housed in the School of Education, Communication and Society (ECS) at King’s College London. The School offers rigorous research training and supervision on a wide range of social science and policy topics centred around social justice and social transformation, including: race and racism; labour and work; gender and sexuality; migration and borders; education; inequality and class; social movements; and distributive, environmental and epistemic justice. There is a particular emphasis on interdisciplinary and critical perspectives with staff and students working in and across a range of disciplines.

Interdisciplinary Policy Studies doctoral students are members of and supervised by academic staff in the Centre for Public Policy Research. We recommend that prospective students read through the CPPR webpages to find their preferred area of research and potential supervisors.

Course Detail

The PhD in Interdisciplinary Policy Studies aims to foster your scholarly and career interests and to prepare you for the world of academic research and policy work. The programme is interdisciplinary and focuses on questions of social justice and social transformation. Students are invited to draw on a range of social science and humanities perspectives and methodologies including sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, history and applied philosophy as well as participatory, creative and arts-based methodologies.

The programme is designed for students who are interested in approaches to social and policy analysis that are both critical and problem-solving. Our interest in and interpretation of policy is rooted in a conception of policy as felt, made and remade in everyday life; that is, as co-constitutive of social worlds, subjectivities and identities. Our research illuminates social and policy processes and effects in a range of global and local contexts.

Current and former PhD students have worked on topics as diverse as gendered and intersectional approaches to humanitarianism; the visual politics of whiteness; the creation of queer communities through voluntary work; radical democratic approaches to pedagogy; the lived experience of intersex people; the care practices of adult nurses; the relationship between Blackness and emotions; social determinants of health for medical professionalism; and the role of young people in government policy making.

Head of group/division

Professor Sharon Gewirtz and Professor Alan Cribb