About us

Psychosocial studies at Birkbeck was founded in 2000 and aims to investigate a wide range of contemporary social, political and personal concerns.

Our department gained 100% for student satisfaction in the National Student Survey 2019 and 98% for teaching in the NSS 2019.

The field of study Psychosocial Studies sits in

• 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.
• The Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck is at the forefront of this new discipline which stretches across and draws from the social sciences and arts and humanities.
• The department is unique in its interdisciplinary focus and draws together academics and clinicians from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds to think together about the relation between social and psychic life.

The questions Psychosocial Studies address

• Academics and clinicians in the Department of Psychosocial Studies 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.

What makes Birkbeck's Department of Psychosocial Studies unique

• Staff members have a keen interest in developing new theoretical paths across a number of critical fields of inquiry as well as forging new, innovative psychosocial research methods.
• The department is genuinely interdisciplinary with academics coming from backgrounds in anthropology, cultural and postcolonial studies, education studies, gender and sexuality studies, literary studies, critical psychology, psychoanalytic studies, sociology and urban studies.
• Academic programmes in psychosocial studies, psychoanalytic studies, education studies, sociology and cultural and postcolonial studies sit alongside counselling and psychotherapy at Birkbeck which is a cluster of programmes within the department designed for those who wish to train as a counsellor or psychotherapist putting theory and practice into dynamic relation.

careers our programmes lead to

• 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; counselling, psychotherapy and 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.

Our staff in the media

• Listen to Lynne Segal discussing her book Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing on BBC Radio Four's Women's Hour.
• Listen to Lynne Segal talking about the problem with ageing well, how growing old throws gender divisions into sharp relief and how literature allows us to step back from the clichés of the moment.
• Listen to Dr Derek Hook discussing his new biography of anti-apartheid campaigner Steve Biko in the Birkbeck Voices series. He explains the significance of Biko’s anti-apartheid campaign and his death in police custody.
• Daily Subversions is a radio show created and presented by Amber Jacobs, Music and Editing by Gordon Hon, Produced by Amber Jacobs and Gordon Hon. A Daily Subversion can be any practice or action in an everyday situation that in some way disrupts entrenched power relations, makes the familiar strange, reveals underlying ideologies, uses humour in unlikely contexts, inspires solidarity and resistance and more. Listen to the podcast of the entire show.
• Read Bruna Seu's article "Don't oversimplify the human response to Japan's plight", Guardian 17 March 2011.