Operational Lead: Laura Ruddick
laura@essex.ac.uk
Academic Lead: Prof. Philip Hancock
phancock@essex.ac.uk

Strategy Board Member: Prof. Shane Martin
sm16256@essex.ac.uk

Website: https://www.essex.ac.uk/

• Ka Chun Au (Resolving Uncertainty and Addressing Crises)

• Richard Philpot (Health, Wellbeing and Social Care)

• Molly Scott (Health, Wellbeing and Social Care)

• Moe Suzuki (Advanced Methods for Social and Economic Research)

Essex Law School

• Technology Law (in its general terms, which is to contain Data Protection and Privacy Law, AI law in its multiple parameters and links, and internet law)

• Company, corporate governance and environmental law  (sustainable development will fall into this field)

• Public Law and institutions 

• Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (specialisation in all of its aspects from the law of war to refugee law and international human rights law)

• International trade and maritime law 

• Health law

• Criminal law

School of Health and Social Care

• Public Health and Global Public Health, health systems and policy

• Clinical and applied psychology in health and social care

• Sociopolitical, economic and environmental determinants of health and wellbeing

• Health and social care inequalities and justice

• Mental health, trauma, and recovery-oriented practice

• Social work, human rights and social justice

• Occupational therapy, participation and everyday living

• Neurodevelopmental conditions, learning disabilities and non-communicable diseases (NCDs)

• Disability, ageing and lifelong care

• Workforce development, professional education, and reflective practice in health and care

• Health, care and policy discourses

We welcome applied, interdisciplinary, and policy-relevant projects that address the design and delivery of health and social care as well as the experiences of people, communities and professionals locally, nationally and globally. Projects may involve quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods approaches, and involve collaboration with service providers, local authorities, or community organisations. We are also welcome projects that can be co-supervised across Departments (e.g. Sociology, Psychology, PPS, EBS or Government).

Examples of project areas include:

• Health Systems and Policy: organisation, commissioning, service design, and integration across health and social care.

• Health Inequalities and Public Health: structural, sociopolitical and environmental determinants of health; equity, access and participation; activism and social movements.

• Clinical and Applied Psychology: behavioural and psychosocial interventions, mental health promotion, and wellbeing across the life-course.

• Mental Health and Wellbeing: trauma-informed, critical mental health studies, patient  and user movements and advocacy, and community-based approaches.

• Social Work and Safeguarding: rights-based, advocacy and activism, ethical and participatory models of care and protection.

• Occupational Therapy and Participation: rehabilitation, inclusive environments, and everyday practices of independence.

• Neurodevelopment, Disability and Long-Term Conditions: lived experience, support systems and service innovation.

• Workforce, Education and Professional Practice: training, professional identity, and reflective practice in interdisciplinary teams.

• Sustainability, Environment and Health: climate justice, food security, and environmental health policy.

• Health, Social Care and Welfare Governance, Discourse and Social Change: institutions, policy processes, and the politics of knowledge in health and social care.

Language and Linguistics

• Language and second language acquisition

• Language Variation and Change

• African Linguistics

• Arabic Linguistics

• Interpreting and Translation

• Conversation Analysis
  Psychology of language teacher training

• Syntax-semantic interface
  Language learning technologies
  The language teaching classroom

• Phonetics and phonology

• Psycholinguistics

Psychology

• Visual perception and cognition — vision, visual search, object and face recognition, eye movements, visual neuroscience.

• Social cognition and interpersonal processes — social perception, trust, imitation, cooperation, intergroup relations, political and moral cognition.

• Language, reading and communication — psycholinguistics, sign language, reading acquisition, prosody, multimodal communication, science communication.

• Development, infancy and childhood — developmental psychopathology, neurodevelopmental disorders, interoception, parenting, inhibitory control.

• Emotion, mental health and wellbeing — emotion processing, anxiety, trauma, perinatal and child mental health, PTSD, wellbeing, weight stigma, emotion and motivation in education.

• Multisensory integration and body representation — interoception, pain, somatosensation, body schema, shared touch, multisensory attention.

• Cognitive control, memory and higher cognition — attention, inhibitory control, working memory, episodic memory, metacognition, brain networks.

• Social and health behaviour change — intention–behaviour relations, self‑regulation, screening uptake, health communication, pro‑environmental and pro‑social decisions.

• Neuroimaging and neurostimulation methods — EEG, ERPs, fMRI, fNIRS hyperscanning, TMS, tDCS, computational modelling.

• Culture, migration and values — acculturation, cross‑cultural differences, human values, religion and meaning, economic psychology, inequality.

Sociology and Criminology

• Crime, Justice and Public Policy

• Culture, Identity and Subjectivity

• Social Divisions and Economic Life

• Transnationalism, Nation and Rights

• Global South Studies

• Sustainability and the Environment

• Intimacy and Sexuality studies

• Migration studies

• Economic Sociology

We seek both theoretical and empirical projects, adopting different methodologies: experimental, qualitative, quantitative, and mixed.