'!padrenullquery'

How does the media shape social and cultural life? How have digital and internet cultures transformed personal and networked interactions? What is the relationship between the media, mass politics, and governance? What is media power, and who wields it? Whatever the questions that interest you, at Essex you can develop the skills to go beyond simply arguing about them, and instead find the evidence needed to answer them.

Our BA in Philosophy, Ethics and Sustainability at Essex University is a course for anyone who wants to understand the environmental crises of today and play an active role in addressing them. Philosophy provides you with the skills to analyse the environmental challenges we face and to creatively re-think our relationship to the non-human world.

How do we understand crime? Should crime be punished? Criminologists engage with some of the most pressing issues, decisions and dilemmas facing societies today.

How do people function in society? Do we pull together because we want to, or because we have to? What motivates so many people to migrate from their own societies to others? Our course provides a thorough grounding in social psychology and sociology, exploring why individuals, groups, and cultures are the way they are and examining why they might be different, as well as developing your qualitative and quantitative research skills.

Join one of the top sociology departments in the UK, ranked 59th globally and 10th in the UK for sociology in the QS World University Rankings by Subject (2023), and further your understanding of the tensions, interactions and networks that dictate how societies are organised. You contribute to the thinking that guides organisations such as the Home Office, Amnesty International and the United Nations.

If you have a strong background in sociology, its cognate disciplines or interdisciplinary areas, and a well-formulated research proposal, then our PhD could be appropriate.

We offer supervision for our PhD Sociolinguistics in the areas of: conversation analysis, language variation and change, dialects and language contact, gender differentiation in language, multilingualism, intercultural pragmatics, language maintenance and shift, Pidgin and Creole linguistics, and language and human rights. Examples of PhD projects which our students have undertaken include studies of the consequences of language contact between Arabic and Cypriot Greek, dialect contact and acquisition of American children in British schools, responses to different types of announcements, and linguistic resources to express agreement.

This course is available for both October and January entry. Our four-year PhD Sociology (with research and communication skills) course has been designed to support students who do not have English as a first language.

Our MA Childhood Studies offers a unique psychosocial focus, seeking to understand not only the outer social experience of children but also their complex inner, emotional worlds. Building upon our existing expertise in postgraduate courses like refugee care, psychoanalytic studies and psychodynamic counselling, this programme offers much more than you would find in other MA Childhood Studies courses.

What is the relationship between migration, social policy and welfare? What are the social and cultural challenges that international migration and forced migration has for both sender and receiving societies? Our course uniquely explores the study of migration through a sociological perspective, investigating how these challenges shape policy agendas with particular attention to issues surrounding social integration, rights and multiculturalism.