For the last two decades, the University of Brighton has made significant contributions to research into key social, political and environmental concerns that constitute twenty-first-century lives. From investigating spaces of authority, activism and protest, to examining embodied politics and practices of access, property rights and citizenship, our human geography staff and PhD students are leading research at the intersections of society, space and environment.
Much of our work takes a critical approach to grounded and material realities and seeks to define and address a range of transformative agendas. Research by human geography-focused staff and PhD students is being used, for example, to examine sexual and gendered inequalities and liveabilities, biopolitics and migration, affect theory, deindustrialisation, emergent theorisations of the commons in relation to new social movements, and political ecologies of enclosure and resource extractivism across a range of geographical contexts.
Recent and current PhD students have been successful in obtaining studentships covering both fees and living costs through the University of Brighton’s involvement in the AHRC Techne Doctoral Training Programme and the ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Programme.
Our Human Geography PhD students have gone on to a variety of different roles following the successful completion of their research. These include academic posts as lecturers and postdoctoral research assistants at the University of Brighton and elsewhere, plus research roles in, for example, the water industry. Many have gone on to management positions in related areas such as directing an events and education not-for-profit consultancy focused on global citizenship and diversity, working with funding agencies in the UK and internationally.