Equipped with a highly employable combination of transferable investigative techniques, analytical skills, discipline-specific expertise, and interdisciplinary flexibility, our graduates will be prepared to work in a diversity of professional sectors seeking to address complex societal challenges.
For the next generation of researchers to tackle societal challenges stemming from environmental change, social inequities, political and cultural disparities, health and wellbeing, and technological evolution, they will need proficiency in systems thinking, evaluating patterns and signatures of resilience quantitatively and qualitatively, and creating novel methods of critical analysis that draw creatively from different disciplines. These fundamental proficiencies constitute the core of our doctoral training programme, and developing them in a new wave of outstanding interdisciplinary scholars is how we will deliver added value to resilience research.
Research areas
To enable such innovative scholarship, this programme leverages and add value to research strengths from the University’s five Faculties, including the Winchester School of Art, gathering researchers who are investigating resilience in myriad contexts, including (but not limited to):
- climate adaptation
- social and environmental legacies of colonialism
- politics of struggle and resistance and expressions in art, music, and literature
- challenges of identity and inclusion
- the role of culture in theorising systems
- natural resource scarcity and sustainability
- theory of institutions and governance
- responses to social rupture
- migration and refugee movements
- philosophy and ethics of risky decision-making
- informal networks of solidarity and social care
- incarceration and carceral spaces
- food insecurity
- economic and financial markets
- hazards and disasters
- natural processes of landscape change
- networks of cyber and physical infrastructure
- critical examination of resilience paradigms
Please note that the Leverhulme Trust is specific about the kinds of research it does not fund. Research supported by this doctoral scholarships programme will comply with the Trust’s stipulations.
Hypothetical cohort
What kinds of research projects might a cohort of doctoral students pursue in our programme?
Here are six hypothetical projects that illustrate how research by the cohort might span the programme vision:
- How were indigenous fisheries, such as for oysters, sustained for millennia as socialāecological systems without collapsing? [ecology + social science + engineering]
- How do migrant populations build and sustain informal networks of care in response to health risks and systemic precarity? [social science + public health + mathematics]
- How are processes of social struggle, inequity, and community resilience expressed and addressed by creative (art, music, literature) cultural scenes? [WSA + English + geography]
- Among pre-colonial knowledge systems across the Middle East, which practices secured legitimisation from the colonial state and which remained hidden? What are the legacies of cultural resistance in post-colonial governance? [politics + history + complexity science]
- How does deliberate mis/disinformation spread across social networks? What are the legal and ethical ramifications of an information system designed to differentiate between reliable content and mis/disinformation? [data science + social science + law]
- How might moral theories for the ethics of uncertainty critically address socio-political and economic systems that drive resilience towards the scale of the individual, especially in the dominant context of polycrisis? [philosophy + environmental humanities + decision science]
Liberal Arts model
This programme will deliver its vision through a “liberal arts” educational model, in which students will progress in cohorts through an expansive, thematic interdisciplinary training curriculum while they also develop discipline-specific expertise.
A liberal-arts model encourages students to take modules across the physical and natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and creative arts on their way to a degree qualification in a specific discipline. At the postgraduate level, this model conveys a formal supportive structure for doctoral students who might otherwise worry they have followed their curiosity into an “undisciplinary” academic space: a situationally challenging and often uncomfortable context for anyone learning the craft of research [Haider et al., 2018].
As a liberal-arts model in microcosm, our training programme will focus on developing creativity, critical thinking, and intellectual versatility as drivers of exploration, investigation, and problem-solving. These characteristics are prized as transferrable skills [WEF, 2020] and are hallmarks of thought-leadership [British Academy, 2020]: essential qualities for scholars who will tackle societal challenges of environmental change, social inequities, health and wellbeing, and technological evolution. A broad intellectual foundation, the core principle of a liberal-arts education, is considered key to innovative, “disruptive” scholarship [Park et al., 2023].
Training
In our programme, students and supervisors will all benefit from engaging with research methods beyond the tools with which they are most familiar.
For example, students and supervisors from typically quantitative fields will practice discerning contextually critical (and not simply technical) perspectives of resilience to yield more insightful quantitative approaches. Those from typically qualitative fields will expand the reach of their critical theory by gaining technical familiarity with resilience in physical systems and formal tools of systems analysis.
Our training programme will focus on developing creativity, critical thinking, and intellectual versatility as drivers of exploration, investigation, and problem-solving across disciplines. Graduates will leave with a complex awareness of resilience as both an analytical frame and a contested rhetorical landscape.
A tailored taught curriculum for each cohort will include two foundational modules in Year 1 (Thinking in Systems and Critical Perspectives of Resilience), an immersive workshop on cross-discipline collaboration in Year 2, and advanced seminar modules in Years 2 and 3. Students will also select two skill-development modules each year from >260 offerings through the University’s Doctoral College Professional Development Programme.
With completion of the full training curriculum, students will receive a formal Certificate in Interdisciplinary Resilience Studies alongside their doctoral award conveyed by the University.
Cohort-building, mentoring & more
Essential cohort-building activities for this programme will include an annual research retreat for students and supervisors, an annual research symposium co-designed with the cohorts and open to the wider University, and a monthly guest seminar with speakers chosen and invited by the students.
Students will be further supported with a cross-cultural mentoring network, and with opportunities for work placements to gain experience in professional roles outside academia.