Social Change, Environment and Sustainability

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report underscores that profound social change is urgently needed to mitigate climate change and meet other sustainability goals. Understanding processes of social, cultural, socio-economic, and socio-technical change and their dynamic relations to the global environmental and climate crisis is of profound importance and urgency.

The MA in Social Change, Environment and Sustainability responds to these needs by creating a world-leading postgraduate programme to develop a generation of graduates and researchers with the skills, knowledge and confidence to contribute to and lead in these transformational processes.

On this programme, you will explore the contribution of sociological understandings of social change to addressing the global environmental crisis, and the challenges of large-scale transformations towards sustainable societies. You will develop a theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded understanding of processes of social change, and you will cover substantive knowledge of the relevant topics, issues and controversies from a social scientific perspective, such as:

- Energy use

- Climate change

- The global food system

- Biodiversity

- Green growth versus ‘de-growth’

You will also delve into cutting edge theoretical approaches to socio-economic, socio-technical and cultural change, and benefit from in-depth training in research methods and design.

Upon graduation, you will be equipped with the knowledge and skills to tackle complex problems rooted in the dynamic relationships between our socio-economic and socio-technical systems and the natural environment.

The University of Manchester is one of the UK’s leading universities for Sociology, and one of the world’s top universities for sustainability and global impact. Our Sociology department is ranked 5th in the UK (Times Higher Education, 2024), with its research achieving among the country’s top 3 universities for power and impact (REF 2021). The University is also ranked top in the UK and Europe (and 2nd world-wide) for global impact against the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (Times Higher Education Impact Rankings, 2024).

This MA is hosted in the Sociology department , and the core teaching team are members of the world leading Sustainable Consumption insittute . Sociology at Manchester is one of the UK's largest and most presitigious centres for the subject, with over 30 academic staff and 60 postgraduate researchers forming a diverse and rigorous academic community.