Current Studentship Opportunities

In its 2023 Global Risks Report, the World Economic Forum ranked biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse as its fourth global risk in terms of both severity and impact in the long run. The loss of biodiversity poses a critical threat to ecosystem health, jeopardizing vital services such as pollination of food crops, water treatment, carbon sequestration, fertile soil and woodland. These risks should be taken into account across the finance sector, where investments are the backbone of economic growth.  

This PhD will investigate best practices in biodiversity finance, in particular within public-private partnerships, both nationally and internationally exploring opportunities to improve biodiversity finance in the future to inform policy development and the establishment of future investment mechanisms. The project may encompass a variety of social science approaches. It is anticipated methods will include interviews, observations (anthropology), field notes, case studies and workshops. 

Engagement with green space and biodiversity is important for mental and physical wellbeing. There is increasing recognition of inequities in nature access: some groups, including LGBTQIA+ people, experience barriers, e.g. feeling unsafe or unwelcome in rural areas. However, there is little evidence around LGBTQIA+ people’s experiences of nature-engagement, and specific benefits and barriers for these groups.

Potential questions include:

• What are current levels of engagement with biodiversity, and access to nature, among LGBTQIA+ communities?
• What are the barriers to greater engagement and access?
• How can new interventions (e.g. creative/cultural practices, and science communication around queer ecologies) address these barriers?

The topic offers opportunities for collaboration with existing community groups and conservation bodies, and could draw on creative methods; e.g. walking interviews, participatory mapping, photo/video elicitation, and biographical interviews. 

Loneliness is linked to poor physical and mental health and the importance of social relationships to wellbeing increasingly recognised. Conceptually, little work exists that unpacks how (different groups of) young people experience loneliness and how this shapes their health – despite evidence highlighting that one in ten young people feel lonely often or always.

Contemporary social challenges including COVID-19, cost of living, and social media pressures have aggravated feelings of isolation. Such feelings are not experienced equally with some young people more ‘at risk’ of isolation because of their social positioning.

Urgent work is needed to understand how young people navigate loneliness and the opportunities for developing belonging and connections in a changing world. This studentship offers an opportunity to develop a study that advances concepts of loneliness and belonging as they relate to young lives and examine the implications for young people's health and wellbeing. 

A key to achieving greater energy independence and the UK’s net zero target is attaining the required behavioural change from households in their energy use patterns.

A standard approach towards this is based on cost-reflective tariffs which accurately ‘pass on’ the cost of energy generation and supply and aim to incentivise households with ‘price signals’ to change their energy use patterns. Cost-reflective tariffs are often designed as if people were rational decision-makers, however, behavioural economics challenges this assumption.

This PhD studentship will examine how to improve the design of cost-reflective tariffs by applying and developing new behavioural insights and evaluating the effectiveness of behavioural interventions via lab experiments. Research directions include tariffs’ complexity, decision inertia, framing effects, loss aversion, and counterfactual feedback. This research will bridge the gap between theories of cost-reflective energy pricing and field experiments. 

Proposals are invited for projects that explore how story-based interventions in urban green spaces might foster nature-connection and wellbeing among disabled and/or neurodivergent people.  Potential research areas include:

• Barriers experienced by disabled and/or neurodivergent people in engaging with local green spaces, especially in contexts of rapid urban development
• How existing story-based schemes (such as smartphone story walks) may reproduce exclusion of disabled and/or neurodivergent people from green spaces
• How innovative, multi-sensory stories can be coproduced with disabled and/or neurodivergent people so as to support their engagements with local green spaces
• Impacts of creating and engaging with these stories for the nature-connection and wellbeing of disabled and/or neurodivergent people.

Proposed methods include in-depth qualitative tools and participatory “experiments” developing story-based interventions in case sites. 

The applicant will develop a research proposal examining the role of gesture in spoken communication. Gesture plays a significant role in communication. It complements spoken language, enabling a speaker to convey emotion and add clarity and emphasis.

The proposal will use experiments and/or big data to help understand how speakers use gesture to clarify the meaning of novel phases such as 'click bait'. Such compound nouns are frequently created in English but are often initially highly ambiguous, with subtle meanings quite distinct from that of their constituent words.

This work is timely and important as we increasingly rely on digital communication media, such as videoconferencing, where gesture is more difficult to observe. The work also has importance in virtual worlds, such as the metaverse, which often do not enable users to gesture with the same degree of fidelity as they would in real life). 

UK local authorities use the Flood and Coastal Risk Management Grant in Aid (FCERM GiA) tool to assess the losses avoided from alternative flood risk management projects. The tool uses a heavily generalised monetary value for average flood damage per house(hold) for the calculation of direct loss.  Social impact is calculated using the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). IMD provides deprivation per average of 750 households.

Decisions made based on data with low-spatial resolution fail to distinguish marginalised communities that need to be priorities for support. This research will establish an advanced methodology for local flood loss assessment by utilising advanced loss assessment methods and data with high-spatial resolution for both physical vulnerability (construction economics) and social vulnerability (socioeconomics). Essex County Council (ECC) will be used as a case study area. The proposed methodology will be validated based on previous ECC works. 

There has been a noticeable rise in the proportion of young adults with higher education qualification in the UK over the past 20 years. However, the proportion of graduates considered to be “underemployed” is estimated to be over one third, with females and graduates from ethnic minority backgrounds more badly affected.

This phenomenon has caught the attention of both policy makers and university administrators. Surveys of employers suggest that apart from structural issues in the labour market, a lack of soft skills and career resilience in graduates could be causing this.

This project assesses the efficacy of a unique student employability initiative from a post-92 university in improving students’ employability skills and career resilience. We adopt a mixed method approach, utilizing individual level student administrative data, as well as structured surveys of students post-graduation. 

The ageing of populations in Europe and beyond has transformed intergenerational relations. Young caregivers are increasingly likely to provide informal care to older relatives or friends.

This scholarship explores the experiences of young adults living in the UK who are in formal education (i.e. in higher education or doing an apprenticeship) and providing informal care to older relatives or friends.

Theoretically, the proposal is grounded in the models of social justice developed by Nancy Fraser and Kathleen Lynch. Methodologically, it draws on a range of qualitative methods, such as interviews, ethnographic approaches, and/or art-based research.

The project is linked to Intergenerational Care Relations (InterCare), an international project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (2024-2028). The applicant will be pursuing a PhD while working alongside international experts and ECRs researching intergenerational care relations.