Psychosocial Studies

Psychosocial studies is a discipline that refuses the sharp boundary between psychology and the social world, insisting that the mind and the social environment are always shaping each other and that neither can be fully understood without reference to the other. It draws on psychoanalytic theory, social theory, qualitative research methods, and the humanities to ask how social forces, including power, inequality, race, gender, class, and culture, are lived and felt by individuals, and how inner life, including desire, anxiety, defence, and attachment, is formed through and within social relationships. It is a genuinely interdisciplinary field that tends to attract students who find purely psychological or purely sociological accounts insufficient.

At Birkbeck College, this programme is delivered part-time, which reflects Birkbeck's distinctive mission as a university that serves students who work during the day and study in the evenings or at other flexible times. Birkbeck has been a pioneer of psychosocial studies in the UK and is home to the Centre for Psychosocial Studies, making it one of the most developed intellectual homes for the subject in the country. Part-time study allows you to bring your professional and personal experience into conversation with the theoretical frameworks you are developing, which is particularly apt in a subject concerned with the relationship between inner life and social experience.

You will engage with psychoanalytic theory, social and political thought, qualitative research methods, and the kinds of interpretive approaches that allow you to work with both text and experience in ways that are analytically rigorous and attentive to unconscious as well as conscious dimensions of social life.

Graduates of psychosocial studies programmes move into counselling and psychotherapy training, social research, community and mental health work, social policy, education, and a range of roles in the voluntary and public sectors. Many go on to postgraduate study in psychosocial studies, counselling, clinical psychology, or related fields.