European Studies Research MPhil/PhD

Overview

The School of Education, Communication and Society at King’s College London is a leading home of interdisciplinary social science research, with particular strengths in public policy, STEM education and linguistics. We are looking for outstanding candidates to join a supportive and dynamic research community.

Students are supervised by staff in one or more of our three Research Centres:

• Centre for Research in Education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

• Centre for Public Policy Research

• Centre for Language Discourse and Communication

In addition to its world-leading academic contributions, the School has a proud history of contributing to public policy debates and the concerns of professional communities of practice across multiple sectors, both nationally and internationally. We provide programmes of study that lead doctoral students to the cutting edge of knowledge, and help education professionals critically analyse, research and effectively respond to changes in thinking and policy in their fields.

We recommend that prospective students read through the Research Centre webpages to find their preferred area of research and potential supervisor.

We offer research supervision for MPhil and PhD dissertations on a variety of areas within European & International Studies. Specialisations include European and national identities; Europeanisation; European and national political thought; EU foreign and security policy; democratization and state-building; party politics; modern social theory; contemporary European and world history; globalisation; migration; social movements; the politics of culture; lobbying and legislative decision-making; energy policy and EU-Asia relations.

Course detail

The School provides extensive research training and supervision on a range of themes including: curriculum, pedagogy and assessment; education management; school improvement; higher education; student & teacher identities; informal & workplace learning; inequality and social justice; the nature of professional expertise; the intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual aspects of personal experience and professional development; and the evolving practices and policy contexts of professional work.

There is a particular emphasis on rigorous interdisciplinary and critical perspectives with staff and students working in and across a range of disciplines.

We also run MPhil and PhD programmes in Interdisciplinary Policy Studies and Discourse & Communication. We are home to a range of research projects, funded by research councils (ESRC and AHRC) and major charities (e.g. Wellcome, Leverhulme and Nuffield).

Current/ recent PhD topics include:

‘The co-construction of ageing identities: a linguistic ethnography of older women’s talk and practices in a hair salon’; ‘The Development of Metaphor Comprehension in Arabic-Speaking Children’.

Information is current, but staff members can change.

Head of group/division

Dr Johnna Montgomerie