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Postgraduate courses

Our MPhil/PhD programmes aim to train you to conduct research of the highest academic standard and to make an original contribution to your subject through your research. Our doctoral programme aims to respond to the needs and interests both of students seeking an academic career or other professional employment and of those who wish to pursue a line of intellectual enquiry for its own sake.

We aim to recruit both recent graduates and mature students who now have the time to pursue an intellectual enthusiasm, perhaps after a lifetime of professional work.

Discover our postgraduate courses. 

MSC CHILDREN, YOUTH AND INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

  • Explore how childhood and the experience of being a child are defined and experienced in different times, places and cultures.
  • Develop a sociological understanding of how childhood is constructed differently across cultures.
  • Consider how global forces, including society and economy, international development and war, shape the experiences of children and young people worldwide.
  • Investigate other factors that shape childhood, including class, gender and ethnicity.

MA/MSC CITIES

  • Cities are centres of political and economic power, orchestrating the social and cultural life of their populations.
  • Take an interdisciplinary approach to the complex and multi-layered dimensions of cities, drawing on the strengths of urban research and teaching in Birkbeck’s Schools of Arts and Social Sciences, History and Philosophy.
  • Using real-world case studies, explore a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches, and choose from modules incorporating a range of disciplinary perspectives as well as historical periods.
  • Make use of opportunities for work placements and international field trips.

MSC CLIMATE CHANGE

  • Designed for both climate change practitioners and those hoping to move into this fast-developing sector, the MSc Climate Change offers you a truly interdisciplinary approach, engaging with academic, professional and popular literature. This programme will help you:
    • understand climate change and how this challenge is being tackled by governments, NGOs and other organisations
    • critically evaluate scientific scenarios of future climate and associated impacts, assess the effectiveness of different policy approaches, and determine suitable responses to the climate change challenge
    • explore the key debates and ideas from a range of viewpoints, balancing science, policy and business practice.

MSC ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY

  • Acquire an advanced-level grounding in sustainable responses to a broad range of important environmental issues.
  • Learn about the key environmental challenges of the 21st century including climate change, biodiversity loss, energy policy, sustainable development and environmental security.
  • Explore the relationship between policy, practice and the ecological environment.
  • Discover effective strategies for addressing the threats and opportunities posed by environmental issues.

MSC GEOGRAPHIC DATA SCIENCE

  • Learn how to analyse and extract insights from geospatial data, uncovering hidden patterns that can help address the big challenges that we face in the twenty-first century.
  • Gain advanced scientific and technical training in capturing, analysing and visualising geospatial information.
  • Work with real-world data on important domains and problems, such as simulating the dynamics of change in the natural and built environment, spotting good locations for renewable energy plants, predicting crime hot-spots.
  • Acquire key data science skills that are in high demand in industry and important tools for research in the field, e.g. ArcGIS and QGIS; scientific programming in Python; geo-statistical and modelling in R; map-making and cartography; big data management with spatial databases, and much more.

MSC GEOGRAPHY

  • Learn about the human and environmental patterns, processes and associations that create our world.
  • Build a programme with flexible study tailored to your own interests and professional needs.
  • Choose from modules that respond to contemporary issues, including the climate and ecological emergency, cities and urbanisation, poverty and inequality, cultural change, nationalism, identity, gender, migration, and international development. 
  • Benefit from a mix of classroom and field-based teaching, and develop important skills in data collection and analysis.

MSC INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

  • Examine the issues, processes and institutions central to global poverty, inequality and development.
  • Explore the debates that have shaped thinking on international poverty and development and the conceptual and theoretical bases of development
  • Learn to participate critically in debates on the changing nature of the multilateral, bilateral and non-governmental institutions designed to address development issues.
  • Understand the context in which development institutions operate and the constraints they face.

MSC INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

  • Study global development, policy and practice and their local impacts from an anthropological perspective.
  • Explore the debates that have shaped thinking on international poverty and development and the conceptual and theoretical bases of development
  • Understand issues, processes and institutions central to global poverty, inequality and development.
  • Analyse the changing nature of the institutions designed to address development issues, the context in which they operate and the constraints they face.

MPHIL/PHD

  • Our MPhil/PhD programmes aim to train you to conduct research of the highest academic standard and to make an original contribution to the subject through your research.
  • Our doctoral programme aims to respond to the needs and interests both of students seeking an academic career or other professional employment and of those who wish to pursue a line of intellectual enquiry for its own sake.
  • We aim to recruit both recent graduates and mature students who now have the time to pursue an intellectual enthusiasm, perhaps after a lifetime of professional work.