Psychosocial Studies (MPhil / PhD)

OUR RESEARCH CULTURE

Birkbeck is at the geographical centre of London’s research library complex, a short distance from the British Library, the University of London Library, the Warburg Institute, the Institute of Historical Research and the Wellcome Institute. All our research students are supported by close individual supervision, occurring once a month, supplemented by research seminars in which all doctoral students of the Department are invited to participate.

Our Department currently offers two doctoral seminars, one run by Professor Lynne Segal (PhD Research Seminar) and one by Dr Margarita Palacios (Critical Theory Doctoral Seminar).

In addition, you are encouraged to attend training in research methodologies organised by the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR). The Department’s provision and that of the BISR is complemented by the work of Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality (BiGS), the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, the Centre for Law and the Humanities and the London Critical Theory Summer School.

Overall, with its long and successful experience in the supervision of both full-time and part-time research students, Birkbeck remains an outstanding choice for doctoral research.

We actively promote interactive graduate life, with multiple resources for fostering a rich postgraduate community at Birkbeck.

Recent research topics include:

• Dimensions of Belonging: Rethinking Retention for Mature Part-time Undergraduates in English Higher Education
• Unpalatable Truths: How Does Society Cope?
• Moments of Russianness: Locating National Identification in Discourse
• Negotiating Gay Chinese Subjectivities - Shame, Dilemmas and Conflicts
• The Dead Mother Complex and Addiction
• Homonationalism, (Critical) Whiteness, and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Britain
• Towards a Theory of the Psychodynamics of Literary Reading
• Dream Construction, Deconstruction: What a Re-reading of Freud on Dreams Can Tell Us About the Structure of the Unconscious and its Relationship to Deconstruction
• Psychosis, Writing and the Social Bond: Psychopathography as Social Critique
• The Phallus and its Discontents
• Constitutive Ambiguities: Collective Memory and Subjectivity in Trabzon, Turkey
• On Sideways Beyond a Communist Future: On Adorno, the Communist Utopia and Post-Communist Art in Poland
• Just-Is: Contingency, Desire and Temporality
• Doctor Who and Gay Identity
• The Queer Act of Breastfeeding: A Psychosocial Inquiry into Meaning-Making in the Representations of Breastfeeding in Visual Culture
• Women and Gender Violence in Italy
• The Monster Within: Between the Onset and Resolution of the Oedipal Crisis
• From Indignation to Collective Action: Subjectivity, Critique and Resistance in a Greek Context
• Cannibalism and Colonialism in Psychoanalysis
• The Notion of Time in Jacques Lacan's Theory.
• Read more about our vibrant research culture.

ASSESSMENT

• Assessment is by doctoral thesis submitted at the end of your research.