Study Psychosocial Studies
We deliver high-quality teaching that centres on drawing from and renewing critical thought in the social sciences and arts and humanities.
The innovative, interdisciplinary field of psychosocial studies is concerned with the interconnections between individual and group identities and historical and contemporary social and political formations. It seeks to link discussions of our precarious and increasingly interconnected collective histories with our ordinary, everyday, intimate and psychic life.
Psychosocial studies holds that conventional distinctions found in many areas of sociology and psychology between the 'psychological' and the 'social' are untenable and that our 'inner' and 'outer' worlds are empirically and theoretically inseparable.
Psychosocial studies has been emerging in the UK since the 1990s as a distinct multidisciplinary field of study. Birkbeck is at the forefront of this new discipline which stretches across and draws from the social sciences and arts and humanities.
Academics and clinicians at Birkbeck have particular interests in several interdisciplinary areas such as violence and war; human rights, citizenship and social movements; communities, collective life and urban multi-culture; ‘race’ and racism; empire and postcoloniality; religion and diaspora; gender and sexuality; youth and ageing; intimacy; parenting; care, friendship and love and learning and higher education.
Quick links
What it's like to study at Birkbeck
Careers in psychosocial studies
Our programmes are designed for those who want to develop new careers or strengthen existing ones in areas such as social research; health and social care; mental health; education; arts, media, journalism and the creative industries and for those who wish to follow professional pathways in the public and charitable sectors such as social policy, law, youth and community work, urban planning and housing and numerous other areas.
Our programmes will also be of interest to those who wish to pursue an academic career in psychosocial studies, sociology, cultural and postcolonial studies and education studies or in the social sciences or arts and humanities more broadly.
