MSc Comparative Social Policy

My DPhil will speak directly to increasingly salient fields of policymaking.

The 2022 Levelling Up White Paper and The British Academy's Social and Cultural Infrastructure project identified spatialized socioeconomic inequality as a significant challenge to social cohesion and wellbeing.

Crises in housing and the cost of living, unequal access to social infrastructure, and the defunding of local governments, make my DPhil project part of the rising tide in policy research seeking to creatively address these pressing social problems.

In contributing to this, my work will increase our understanding of inequality and how we can combat it at a local level.

My DPhil will cross methodological and disciplinary boundaries, bringing new themes into social policy research and mixing qualitative and qualitative methods. Spatial polarization and social infrastructure are often explored through sociological and geographical research.

By investigating these themes through the lens of social policy, I will examine the role of political institutions in shaping spatial polarization and the qualities of social infrastructure, which often goes unaddressed in research on these topics (Bernt, 2022).

My research will add to a new and growing body of social policy literature that both quantitatively investigates the impacts of spatial socioeconomic inequality, whilst also qualitatively exploring what these entail in people's daily lives, as seen in the work of Koch,Fransham and colleagues (2020).

By exploring the relationship between socioeconomic inequality and access to social infrastructure, my research will shed light on the roles of social and spatial exclusion in the experience of poverty (Barnard, 2022), making my DPhil a valuable contribution to the study of inequality and marginalization.

My use of both quantitative and qualitative approaches will also allow me to triangulate different methods and sources of evidence to identify how (in)equality in social infrastructure access is experienced and how it can be effectively politically addressed.

The growing popularity of social infrastructure as a theme in the analysis of social cohesion and (in)equality gives me ample options for institutions with whom I could collaborate or complete a project/internship.

The Greater London Authority's Social Integration Design Lab, Good Growth by Design Inquiry, and organizations such as Social Life, all do work that is highly relevant to my research interests, in which I would be very eager to participate.

I would also consider interning with Belong - The Cohesion and Integration Network, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and the Institute for Community Studies.