Course summary

On our four-year BA Sociology (including foundation year), we work with you to develop your subject-specific knowledge, and to improve your academic skills. You receive a thorough grounding in these areas during your foundation year (known as Year Zero) to prepare you for a further three years of undergraduate study at Essex. You are an Essex student from day one, a member of our global community based at the most internationally diverse campus university in the UK. At Essex, we investigate what connects people with each other, as well as what divides them. We consider every aspect of our daily lives, from how we relate to politicians, celebrities and friends, to how we define ourselves, our families, and others. You study topics ranging from digital media and society, to psychiatry and mental illness, to Japanese culture, to the art, film and personal testimony of war. We are a large and friendly department, offering a range of diversity of specialisms including:

• Social divisions, inequality, the nature of work and commercial culture

• Culture, identity and subjectivity

• Public policy regarding health, the environment, crime and aging

• Citizenship, multiculturalism and human rights

• Receive training in sociological methods – how to design a survey, conduct an interview, and use quantitative analysis from basic statistic to big data – in order to ask the difficult questions