Course summary

At a local, national and global level, we are witnessing an intense period of social transformation and fragmentation. Within this context, there is growing political and policy recognition of the need to better understand and address social inequalities. The social sciences have an important role to play in mapping and understanding how inequalities arise and in tackling their causes and consequences. Innovative developments are offering new methodological, theoretical and empirical insights into entrenched and emerging inequalities of status, resource, outcome and opportunity. This interdisciplinary course explores all forms of inequality, as well as the social, political and economic implications. It will equip you with the necessary knowledge and skills to understand, research and analyse complex inequalities. Capitalising on expertise in the School of Sociology and Social Policy and the Leeds Inequalities Research Network, you’ll harness leading analytical approaches combining qualitative, quantitative and data analytic methods (in close collaboration with the School of Geography). In addition to offering an advanced understanding of rising material inequality, this course encourages an intersectional approach to understanding socio-economic stratification and how this links with physical (dis)ability, race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, class and age. You’ll benefit from a stimulating intellectual environment and cutting-edge methodological approaches to comparing the formation and consequences of inequalities across a range of national and international contexts. Through an examination of geopolitical and socioeconomic shifts, such as urbanisation and globalisation, you are actively supported to critically interrogate the contemporary character and extent of social inequality. The course offers an Applied Research Project (ARP) option as an alternative to the standard dissertation. The ARP is a dissertation run in partnership with a non-academic organisation and enables you to undertake research with direct policy and practice relevancies. We have a range of projects arranged in partnership with Voluntary Action Leeds, Leeds City Council and the University of Leeds Sustainability Service amongst others.