Interdisciplinary Policy Studies MPhil/PhD

King's College London, University of London

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; the role of young people in government policy making and the implications of the social determinants of health for medical professionalism.