Social Research MA - 2019 Entry

Course Overview

This MA in Social Research combines rigorous methodological training with flexible sets of modules in different areas of social inquiry, and is thus suitable for those with a range of disciplinary backgrounds. It is ideal for both those wishing to train or re-train in social research skills to support a career in the public or private sector and those interested in preparing for further PhD research. Our students have gone on to a range of careers, including fast-track civil service positions, research in private companies, positions in non-governmental organisations and academic research careers.

Five different pathways are available:

• Sociology
• Gender and Women’s Studies
• Media and Cultural Studies
• Environment, Culture and Society
• Science, Technology, Innovation and Social Practices

The programme consists of four core modules, two optional modules and a dissertation. It is possible for pathways to be slightly amended to tailor them more closely to your needs. If you have any questions about which pathway is best suited to your interests, please contact us.

As a programme recognised by the Northwest Doctoral Training Partnership (Economic and Social Research Council), you would be eligible to apply for funding through MA or MA+PhD studentships. You will learn how to design, analyse and defend research through hands-on, student-directed activities, and will become skilled in the translation of theoretically informed research questions into research projects.

Course Structure

This MA has five different pathways available which allow students to tailor the programme to their own interests without losing the focus on research training. Below is a sample of modules which are available to students on this programme - for full details please read more about our pathways.

Core

• Dissertation

  As the final element in your Masters programme, the MA dissertation allows you to bring together and showcase the skills and knowledge you have acquired from other modules, and demonstrate your ability to carry out a substantial independent research project.

  Provided a suitable supervisor is available, you can choose your own topic to investigate. Once you have chosen your topic, the Department will provide a supervisor that best matches your research interests. You will be assessed on your capacity to define your research topic, to articulate a coherent scheme for examining that topic, to gather the necessary information, and to analyse and present the information in a way which does justice to the topic you have chosen.

  As preparation for your dissertation you will take part in five MA learning skills workshops, although this element of the module is not formally assessed. These sessions are designed to help you develop your skills in reading, reviewing and writing, and in presenting your work in an environment which offers both support and constructive criticism.

Optional

• Research Projects in Practice: From Design to Dissemination

  This module provides you with first-hand experience of organising and undertaking a group research project on a subject of your own choosing. You will work through processes of research design and strategy, developing research questions, planning and carrying out fieldwork and analysis, and presenting and evaluating research.

  Working together in groups of four or five, you will produce a high-quality project report which could take various forms – for example, an article for publication, a multimedia website, or a report suitable for presentation to a funding body. You also make an oral presentation of your work.

  Although the module is essentially practical, it also provides the opportunity for you to examine generic issues involved in doing social research and to learn about the contemporary context of research policy and funding.

• Contemporary Debates in Social Theory

  This module offers you the chance to engage with the work of some key social theorists influencing sociology today – particularly their views, implicit or explicit, on the role and nature of critique and values in social science, how they theorise our social nature, and power in social life.

  We will address a number of major questions – for example, are so-called ‘critical’ approaches compatible with the idea of sociology as a social science? On what grounds can we develop critiques of society? If we are products of our social circumstances, what room, if any, does that leave for individual responsibility? How can we best theorise power? What can sociology tell us about neoliberalism?

  Through examining such questions we aim to help you form your own judgement of how adequate these sociological theories are, and how they might usefully inform research. Sub-themes of the module include universalism, discourse, structure and agency.

• The Social Life of Science and Technology: Theories and Debates

  This module explores the social, ethical and political implications of science and technology, introducing you to the main theoretical and methodological approaches associated with science and technology studies (STS) and to the debates between them.

  On this module you will acquire a thorough grounding in the history of STS through review and discussion of seminal texts and you will also be introduced to current approaches, using a varied mix of workshops, contemporary case studies, film screenings and two laboratory visits.

  This enables us to explore how different theoretical approaches may be applied, and helps to build your understanding of how different approaches to analysis imply particular political and epistemological assumptions. You will also develop the capacity to criticise different approaches to STS, and gain the initial knowledge needed to develop and justify your own approaches.

  Lancaster is home to the internationally recognised Centre for Science Studies and is a centre of excellence for STS research. On this module you will meet some of the key researchers in the field.

• Critical Debates in Media and Cultural Studies

  This module introduces approaches to critical analysis of key forms of contemporary media and culture such as commodities, celebrities, platforms and different media forms and environments.

  We will read and discuss recent and formative writings in cultural and media studies, allowing you to develop an understanding of key concepts such as subjectivity, platform, materiality, commodity, difference, value and power, and how they help us make sense of contemporary social life. You will also engage with analytical work on specific media platforms, products and practices, ranging from photographs and search engines to newspapers and reality TV.

  Among the topics that we will explore are:

  • concepts of culture in relation to images, commodities and brands

  • popular culture, audiences and media practices associated with celebrity

  • contemporary digital media cultures, and their circulation and consumption

  • embodiment, differences, politics and identities amidst media change

• Debates in Gender Research

  This module introduces you to the practicalities and philosophies of doing interdisciplinary research in gender and women’s studies. You will learn to interpret, understand and explore the consequences of particular research methods and will be encouraged to consider the relationship between theories and methods in research.

  The module also provides scope for reflecting on the politics of knowledge, the ethics of research, and the relationship between disciplines and interdisciplinary fields such as gender and women’s studies. You will learn how some key conceptual frameworks within feminism (for example, sex and gender, body politics, sexual difference, queer) have been constructed over time through both research practices and theoretical arguments.

  This module will be useful as preparation for your own research later in the programme and particularly for your Masters dissertation.

• Gender, Sex and Bodies

  How are gender, sex and bodies understood in contemporary sociology and feminist theory? How do feminist theorists and social scientists address questions of difference, representation and performativity in their research? What kinds of methods are used to research sex, gender and bodies?

  In this module we engage in depth with the work of particular theorists (enabling you to acquire skills in close reading) and we explore current issues of importance to feminism. These include girlhood and sexualisation, gender and work, race and racism, and sex and sexuality.

  The essays you write then give you scope to follow your own interests in more depth by using the reading lists provided and undertaking independent research.

• Environment and Culture

  Current debates over issues such as genetically modified crops, nuclear power, shale gas, loss of biodiversity or climate justice – and the protest movements and campaigns that have arisen in response – provide tangible evidence that the relationship between society and the environment is a difficult and often controversial one.

  This module examines the role that sociology and social theory can play in helping us to understand that relationship better, and explores the range of approaches that have been developed in environmental sociology.

  Studying the environment sociologically opens up a host of interconnected social, cultural and political issues. Whose knowledge counts? How can we handle unquantifiable risk? What role should technology play? And what about democracy, freedom, diversity and justice?

  Using lectures and seminar discussion, the module will lead you through the resources of sociology and social theory to enable you to think through these questions in relation to some of the most urgent environmental issues facing societies today. For example, what might ‘liveable cities’ look like in the future? Do biotechnologies provide solutions to world hunger, or not? How can governments make democratic decisions about the disposal of nuclear waste?

• Feminist Media and Cultural Studies

  This module focuses on crucial feminist interventions in cultural production and cultural studies and introduces you to contemporary debates in feminist theory. It looks at specific forms of activism, engagement and resistance that have identified hierarchies and challenged the ways in which these produce gendered, sexual, ethnic and racial identities and oppression.

  We will examine a range of sources from popular culture, media, art, public culture and policy, enabling us to bring feminist cultural theory into dialogue with a range of media and other cultural productions and practices.

  The particular focus and format of the module may change each year, allowing us to link to topical debates or events taking place in the wider community. Recently, for example, the module was run as a week-long summer school on Feminist Activism and involved film screenings, lectures, group work and discussions. It ran in parallel with a Manchester University Summer School on “Queer Arts as Activism”, and included a field trip to Manchester.

• Feminist Technoscience Studies

  This module runs as an intensive workshop over 4 days in the summer term. It offers an advanced introduction to feminist technoscience studies, focusing on theoretical and empirical developments, as well as key debates. It will ask what counts as ‘science’ and ‘technology’, how are they imagined and practiced, and how scientific and technological knowledges are produced, circulated, and deployed.

  Theoretical debates will be introduced and investigated through a specific empirical topic, chosen each year to reflect the particular expertise of tutors for example feminism encounters biotechnology; feminism and the non-human; bodies, cyborgs and prostheses; genomics, kinship and kinds; virtual and affective technologies.

• Social and Cultural Theory

  This module examines the ways in which different social theoretical perspectives approach their objects. It focuses on three main topics: an investigation of the nature of the object of social theory, that is, the social; key issues in contemporary social theory; and the relationship between social theory, modernity and postmodernity.

• Cybercultures

  In this module you will look at the possible long-term effects of information and communications technology (ICT) on human society.

  You will do this by critically exploring the beliefs and claims of different ‘cybercultures’ – social and cultural movements, each of which promotes a particular vision of the future premised on the radically transformative potential of ICT.

  You will explore a range of ‘cultural imaginaries’as manifested in popular culture, civil society, professional groups and scholarly writing. In these imaginaries, the development and spread of digital and networked technologies are seen as having revolutionary implications for social identities, political life and economic relations – or even for the essence or viability of human beings themselves.

  These imaginaries involve narratives that range from the utopian to the apocalyptic – from cybercommunist and cyberfeminist visions of rejuvenated progressive politics to a postpolitical world run by algorithmic capitalism, or from transhumanist visions of digital immortality to dire warnings of machine super-intelligence replacing humanity.

  Through lectures, seminar discussions, film screenings and debates, and drawing on sociology, media and cultural studies, science studies, philosophy and science fiction, you will learn about some of the most high-stakes questions about the future of society.

• Critical Methods in Media and Cultural Studies

  This module is designed to introduce you to contemporary methodological issues, key approaches, practical techniques, and case examples relating to the study of media and culture.

  Many different methods are used in media and cultural studies, and that variety is reflected in this module. To explore research practice in this discipline, we look at textual and discourse analysis, visual analysis, ethnography and participatory approaches, but place a strong emphasis on engaging with issues of identity, differences, power and experience in the hyper-complex media and cultural environments that we live in.

  To give you a taste of particular research methods and approaches, we draw on recent examples of media and cultural research done here at Lancaster, and encourage you to explore their theoretical and practical implications.

  In conversation with invited guest researchers, you will also be able to discuss and critically evaluate different methodological approaches and learn how to draw on these approaches as a starting point for your own research. This helps to ensure that you acquire a good understanding of the key elements in planning and carrying out independent research projects.

• Methods in Science and Technology Studies

  This module is designed to familiarise you with various ways of thinking about and analysing contemporary relations between science, technology and society. It draws upon a rich vein of theory and practice within science and technology studies (STS), an area of research that is particularly strong at Lancaster University.

  You will be encouraged to ask sociologically informed questions about the sciences and technologies that have become part of our everyday lives – including, for example, mobile phones, social media, cloud computing, genetic modification, human fertilisation techniques, air conditioning and technologies for electricity generation.

  The module helps you to understand how different interpretive research methodologies used in STS – such as ethnography and participant observation, surveys, and analysis of social media – enable a researcher to ask important critical questions about science, technology, the environment and society.

  Through case studies chosen by students on the module you will consider how we might engage as analysts – using which methods and practices? In what kinds of role? With what kind of limitations? And with what kinds of responsibility and accountability?

• Mobilities, Society & Change

  This module reflects the mobilities turn within the social sciences, a turn pioneered at Lancaster’s Centre for Mobilities Research, which is recognised worldwide as a key centre for mobilities research.

  Social institutions and social practices rest upon multiple mobilities – of people, objects, messages and ideas – and the complex interconnections between them.

  This module explores how various types of mobility are fundamental to society. It shows that examining these many different mobilities, fluid and fleeting as they often are, is crucial to social science inquiry, explanation and critique. It provides key conceptual and methodological resources that will help you to understand changes in past, present and future patterns of mobility and what fateful implications they can have for people’s lives and experiences.

• The Philosophies of Social Research
  Module description

  • empiricism, positivism and falsificationism
  • an introduction to post-empiricist philosophy of science, especially Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend
  • explanation in the social sciences
  • the varieties of interpretivist philosophy of social science
  • the debates surrounding a realist philosophy of science
  • critical social science
  • the feminist critique of the objectivity of science
  • the relevance and application of these debates to a variety of social sciences

  Aims and objectives

  FASS507/SOCL922 provides an introduction to the philosophy of the social sciences by exploring the following questions:

  • What claims to knowledge are made by science?
  • Can social science make similar claims to natural science to be a science?
  • What other philosophical foundations might social science use to establish its claims to systematic knowledge?
  • What are the main different positions in contemporary philosophy of social science? What arguments are used for and against these different positions?
  • What relevance does the philosophy of social science have to the practicalities of social research?
  • How can it help us think about the role that the social sciences do and should play in society?

  By the end of the course students should be able to understand the crucial differences between different philosophical perspectives on the practice of social science, and be able to demonstrate a critical understanding of how their research might constitute a claim to knowledge.

Information contained on the website with respect to modules is correct at the time of publication, but changes may be necessary, for example as a result of student feedback, Professional Statutory and Regulatory Bodies' (PSRB) requirements, staff changes, and new research.

Key Information

Undergraduate Degree: 2:1 (Hons) degree (UK or equivalent)in a relevant social science

If you have studied outside of the UK, you can check your qualifications here: International Qualifications

English Language: IELTS - Overall score of at least 7.0, with no individual element below 6.0

We consider tests from other providers, which can be found here: English language requirements

If your score is below our requirements we may consider you for one of our pre-sessional English language programmes

Pre-sessional English language programmes available:

4 Week Overall score of at least 6.5, with no individual element below 6.0

10 Week Overall score of at least 6.0, with no individual element below 5.5

 Longer courses are not an option for this programme

Funding: All applicants should consult our information on Fees and Funding; Faculty Scholarships and Funding; Sociology Fees and Funding

Further information: For more information about the department please visit our webpages http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/

Fees

Fees

The University will not increase the Tuition Fee you are charged during the course of an academic year.

If you are studying on a programme of more than one year's duration, the tuition fees for subsequent years of your programme are likely to increase each year. The way in which continuing students' fee rates are determined varies according to an individual's 'fee status' as set out on our fees webpages.

What are tuition fees for?

Studying at a UK University means that you need to pay an annual fee for your tuition, which covers the costs associated with teaching, examinations, assessment and graduation.

The fee that you will be charged depends on whether you are considered to be a UK, EU or overseas student. Visiting students will be charged a pro-rata fee for periods of study less than a year.

Our annual tuition fee is set for a 12 month session, which usually runs from October to September the following year.

How does Lancaster set overseas tuition fees?

Overseas fees, alongside all other sources of income, allow the University to maintain its abilities across the range of activities and services. Each year the University's Finance Committee consider recommendations for increases to fees proposed for all categories of student and this takes into account a range of factors including projected cost inflation for the University, comparisons against other high-quality institutions and external financial factors such as projected exchange rate movements.

What support is available towards tuition fees?

Lancaster University's priority is to support every student in making the most of their education. Many of our students each year will be entitled to bursaries or scholarships to help with the cost of fees and/or living expenses. You can find out more about financial support, studentships, and awards for postgraduate study on our website.

Related Courses

Related Courses

• Applied Social Science : PhD
• Environment and Society : PhD
• Environment, Culture and Society : MA
• Gender and Women's Studies : MA
• Gender and Women's Studies : MPhil/PhD
• Gender and Women's Studies and English : MA
• Gender and Women's Studies and Sociology : MA
• Media and Cultural Studies : MA
• Media and Cultural Studies : PhD
• Science Studies : PhD
• Social Work : MA
• Sociology : MA
• Sociology : PhD