Major funding win to support doctoral training at south east universities

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has awarded a Doctoral Training Partnership to Goldsmiths and its nine partner universities in the South East Network for Social Sciences Consortium (SeNSS) – enabling the group to offer fully funded doctoral studentships for the next six years.

The number of studentships the ESRC will award to SeNSS will be announced in September 2016.

In addition, the ESRC will fund a number of postdoctoral fellowships, some of which will be offered through SeNSS.

With this Doctoral Training Partnership SeNSS is committed to improving and increasing world-class doctoral training for the next generation of social scientists at some of the UK’s leading research-intensive universities.

Studentships will cover research methods training, researcher development, research and transferable skills training, subject-specific training and advanced training where required.

Studentships will be offered in 13 different pathways: Business and Management, Development, Economics, Education, Human Geography, Linguistics, Political Science and International Studies, Psychology, Science, Technology and Sustainability, Social Anthropology, Social Work and Policy, Socio-Legal Studies and Sociology.

The first intake of students starts in October 2017. SeNSS partner universities will match-fund 25 per cent of ESRC studentships over the Doctoral Training Partnership’s six-year lifespan.

SeNSS consists of Goldsmiths, City University London, Roehampton University, Royal Holloway, and the Universities of East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Reading, Surrey and Sussex.

Spanning a large geographic area but with common interests, the SeNSS partnership is an opportunity for universities to utilise social science expertise and play an important role in the south east’s future challenges for regional integration, economic prosperity, housing, transportation and community demographic changes.

The consortium of universities already contains over 200 existing partnerships with external organisations, and opportunities with external sectors are embedded in the design of doctoral training.

SeNSS’ External Innovation Group, comprising senior research users and practitioners, will provide strategic advice and thought leadership for such collaborations.

SeNSS is led Professor Shamit Saggar at the University of Essex, with Deputy Director Professor Alan Pickering at Goldsmiths.