Our Programme – Your Degree:

Undergraduate study in the Department of Sociological Studies

The Department of Sociological Studies is distinctive in combining excellence in Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work. This multi-disciplinarity is our greatest strength and, over many years, has provided us with a solid foundation for delivering consistently innovative high-quality teaching and research. Indeed, the Department has a long history of integrating research into our teaching and many distinguished scholars have played an integral part in the development of our degree programme over the years. The alumni roll-call of significant scholars who have worked in the Department includes David Lee, Barry Smart, Ian Taylor, Maurice Roche, Diane Richardson, Nick Stevenson, Bob Deacon and Jenny Hockey. Keith Kelsall, who masterminded the formation of the department in 1960, also helped to found the British Sociological Association and its flagship journal Sociology. Our annual prizes for the best dissertations are also named to mark the contributions that John Westergaard and Eric Sainsbury made to the Department and the disciplines of sociology, social policy and social work more generally. John and Eric still read the prize-winning dissertations each year. Today, Alan Walker, Allison James, Richard Jenkins, Jan Horwath, Clive Norris and other internationally-recognised scholars continue to make lasting and important contributions to social science So, not only will you be working alongside some of the most important people currently working in the field today, but your work may also be read by some of the most important figures in recent sociological memory too.

Just as society is consistently evolving, the focus of our sociological gaze changes too. As one of the most innovative and wide-ranging courses in the country, we have developed our programme with exactly this in mind and have made a concerted effort to ensure that you have the ability to shape your degree to your own interests and needs. Just as our academics and students have always done, we continue to place an emphasis on encouraging you to investigate the social world using the range of research skills that we have built into our programme. We specifically try to develop your sociological confidence so that you can use your degree in situations that are relevant to you, whatever and wherever these may be. We believe passionately that the ability to think sociologically is an important skill that can be applied to all areas of the social world. So whether you are looking to work in a particular field of employment, or are just interested in a particular topic, your degree is going to have many uses when you graduate.

In your first year we will introduce you to the foundations of sociological thinking and encourage you to explore how this can applied to your everyday lives in our seminar-based modules on ‘The Sociological Imagination’ and ‘Classical Sociological Theory’. Within our ‘Social Divisions’ modules, we’ll also make sure you that you have a thorough understanding of inequality within society. In our modules on ‘Social Policy and Problems’ you will also find out how various governments and local agencies have sought to address those divides – or not. Elsewhere we have a number of very popular optional modules for you to choose from that will allow you to see how the central interests of the Department, sociological imagination and social inequality, are embedded within particular topics. Currently these modules include: gender and sexuality, crime and deviance, science and society, and globalisation. Within the modules at level one, we have also embedded a series of inter-related tasks that will help you to develop your communication skills. Whether it is in the form of finding the most up-to-date information and literature, or one-to-one meetings with your personal tutors to receive feedback on your assessments, our innovative suite of study-skills tasks we will give you the necessary to tools to fulfil your potential at the University of Sheffield and beyond.

In your second year, we will continue to encourage you to understand how society is organised with reference to particular people and groups, and the policies that impact upon them. If you are studying on our Social Policy and Sociology programme you will learn more about how governments respond to the needs of its people in our module on the ‘Varieties of Welfare’. In semester two, you’ll also learn about how these models of welfare differ around the world in the module ‘Social Policy in a Global Context’. If you are on our Sociology programme, then you will continue to develop your sociological imagination in the module ‘Sociological Theory and Analysis’ where you will be introduced to different social theorists and how they have sought to understand the relationship between the individual and society – and you’ll find out how their ideas can be applied in all-sorts of unlikely places. Beyond these core modules we also have a range of other subjects for you to choose from that demonstrate the relevance of social theory on one hand, and the impact of social divisions and social policy on the other; in many cases we’ll show you how these concerns are inter-related. We have a wide range of modules on topics as diverse as: ‘Leisure, Sport and Society’, ‘Media Studies’, ‘Work and Labour’, ‘the Government of Life and Death’, ‘Race and Racism’, ‘the Sociology of the Family’ and ‘Crime’. You can choose which apply to your own particular interests and we’ll help you to develop the ability to think about those areas sociologically.

Over the first two years of your degree, four core research methods modules, taken together, will ensure that you can understand the complexities of empirical research - the life blood of Social Policy and Sociology - whilst also providing you with an identifiable range of skills that can be utilised in any number of employment environments. As research-active academics, we strongly believe that sociological research is not limited to the classroom and in an increasingly research-informed world, it is vital that you have an ability to not only understand research, but to conduct it too. So, in pushing beyond more traditional lecture-based approaches to research methods, our degree programme specifically requires you to develop a range of tangible skills that can be used to solve questions and problems in a variety of contexts.

In your final year, you will be ready to put your new-found sociological imagination and research skills to work as you directly engage with academics working at the ‘coal-face’ of their discipline. All of our modules at level three are research-based in that they cover areas of interest that your Lecturers and Professors are currently working on and writing about: you’ll be working on cutting-edge sociological problems and interests as they are emerging and happening. So if you have an interest in genetics, evil, childhood, surveillance, the politics of higher education, or even terrorists and tiller-girls, we guarantee that there will be something for you. You’ll even be able to explore what it means to be human!

At the heart of your final year, and the culmination of your degree itself, is your dissertation. Here, you will utilise all of the skills and knowledge that you have developed across your degree programme to investigate a topic of your choosing and carry out an original piece of research. Working under the guidance of one of our experienced academics, we will guide you from the point of coming up with an idea all the way to showing you how to understand the style and form of research outputs. So whether you have an interest in the representation of gender in ‘chick-flicks’ or the impact of welfare regimes of nation states on levels of poverty or happiness, we will give you the skills necessary to investigate your interest in a critically-informed manner. Perhaps the most rewarding part of your degree, your dissertation project will help us to continue the best traditions of the Department as you produce original and interesting research that responds to the concerns and needs of wider society.