Study Details: MRes 1-year full-time; 2.5-years part-time
This MRes is a taught postgraduate degree that provides high quality training in anthropology and anthropological research. The degree is of particular relevance for those who wish to use such training as a foundation for PhD study or who are keen to enhance their careers through the acquisition of advanced knowledge and research skills. Accordingly, the MRes can be completed as a qualification in itself, or as the first stage in a four-year PhD programme.
For students with no previous anthropological training, it can also act as a conversion course to anthropology.
A unique feature of this programme is that students can design, in collaboration with academic staff, Guided Study Modules to focus on their particular areas of research interest
The MRes/MPhil/PhD programme marries the best aspects of the traditional apprenticeship system of anthropology – students work with a leading anthropologist in their geographical area of interest and undertake a formal training programme concerned with developing broader anthropological skills in the context of social science as a whole.
Our students have been or are being funded by the British Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme, the World Health Organization, national and local governments as well as NGOs.
Normally a good Honours degree from a UK institution; an equivalent overseas qualification; or an equivalent professional qualification (eg from a health, teaching or child welfare background or similar). Candidates not fully meeting these criteria may nevertheless be considered.
English Language Requirements
Brunel also offers our own BrunELT English Test and accept a range of other language courses. We also have a range of Pre-sessional English language courses, for students who do not meet these requirements, or who wish to improve their English.
Home/EU students: £5,060 full-time, £2,530 part-time; International students: £11,330 full-time, £5,665 part-time
The MRes is specifically designed for students wishing to proceed to doctoral study in anthropology. However, the broad range of research strategies taught also makes it an excellent basis for professional development and research in other areas of social science.
The MRes includes three core modules that provide students with training in ethnographic research methods and graduate research skills. Students can then choose 60 credits from an extensive range of elective modules covering core areas of research in contemporary anthropology, in many of which we have an international reputation. The final element of the degree involves the supervised completion of a dissertation (approximately 15,000 words).
Graduate Research Skills and Professional Development
Main topics of study: reviewing research aims and objectives; choosing research methods; study design, sampling, and analytical issues in the use of such methods; appropriate resources for such studies; using information technologies; managing a research project, presenting research information.
Dissertation in Social Anthropology Research
The specific topics and/or research problems discussed in the dissertation are a function of the student’s particular research interest in the domain of social anthropology, and the data generated by the student’s own field work.
Ethnographic Research Methods
Main topics of study: the centrality of fieldwork to anthropological research; theoretical and practical issues of participant observation, open-ended unstructured interviews and semi-structured interviews; the advantages and disadvantages of using questionnaires during fieldwork; different styles of ethnographic writing dilemmas arising in the course of fieldwork; constructing a research proposal.
Anthropology of Education and Learning
Main topics of study: history of anthropology of education and learning; evaluating the anthropological contribution to research in education; education, learning and the politics of culture and society;; gaining access in ethnographic research; ethical clearance and ethical
education, learning and international development; education and schooling in social context; education, authority and the transmission of knowledge; education and apprenticeship; education, learning and literacy; education and categories of social distinction – age, kinship, nationalism and religion; education and categories of social distinction – race, class, gender and ethnicity; education, knowledge and social memory; education, the state and nationalism
Themes in Psychological and Psychiatric Anthropology
Main topics of study: the development of psychological and psychiatric anthropology;
theories of emotion (approaches to, and critiques of, the ‘social construction of emotion’); selfhood and subjectivity in cross-cultural perspective; psychoanalytic approaches; folk psychologies; culture and personality; mental health and ethnic minorities; cultural perspectives on madness; narrative and illness; the construction of diagnostic categories.
Anthropological and Global Health
Main topics of study: changing conceptions of public health; constructing public health problems: the case of female circumcision; the social construction of epidemics; constructions of health and sickness in war zones; the changing relationship between anthropology and epidemiology; targeting people, targeting places: the limits of HIV prevention strategies; neglected tropical diseases and the case for targeted disease control programmes; public health and healing in the aftermath of war; evaluating public health policy; human rights and public health; ethical aspects of public health policy and practice.
The Anthropology of Childhood and Youth
Main topics of study: the concept of the child in society; children’s participation in society; children’s ways of coping with violence; child play; child labour; the history of youth as a political category; young people’s resistance to marginalisation; the radicalisation of young people.
Medical Anthropology in Clinical and Community Settings
Main topics of study: The therapeutic “triangle”, at the micro-level, of patient, doctor and patient’s kin and community; at the macro-level, the political economy of health, the dynamics of a national medical culture; the problem of efficacy in treatments and the role of the placebo effect; how might one change people’s health behaviour through public health? Plus problems in the specific analysis, cross-culturally of 1 chronic illness and disability; 2 the process of dying; 3 pain; 4 ‘mental illness’.
Anthropology of Biomedicine and Psychiatry
Main topics of study: health care pluralism in the UK, and abroad; folk, traditional and alternative healers; cultural attitudes to food and causes of malnutrition; cross-cultural psychiatry, and cross-cultural definitions of mental illness; culture-bound syndromes; migration, stress and health; urbanisation and the urban poor; family planning programmes; HIV and AIDS; primary health care; malaria; cultural barriers to international aid programmes.
Kinship and New Directions in Anthropology
Main topics of study: descent and alliance, the household, the incest taboo, new reproductive technologies, kinship and the state, gay kinship, the abortion debate, conceptions of social reproduction, kinship and migration, the social and cultural construction of paternity.
Anthropology of the Body
Main topics of study: The social body; embodiment, ‘habitus’ and phenomenological approaches to the body; cross-cultural perceptions of the body; the body in parts; sex and gender; childhood and the body; bodily norms, beauty and ideas of the perfect body; biomedicine and the body; death and the dying body.
Anthropology of the Person
Main topics of study: theories of the person; the notion of ‘normality’; the emergence of memero-politics; classifications, kinds, and kind-making; ‘looping effects’; cultural bound syndrome and ‘ecological niche’.
Anthropology of Disability and Difference
Main topics of study: A critical overview of the medical and social models of disability that have framed discourse on disability; ethnographic and phenomenological alternatives to such approaches; conducting fieldwork with cognitively and physically impaired people; disability across the life course, with a focus on childhood disability; identity and disability; social policy, development, the state and disability; ethical dilemmas and the new genetics.
Guided Study Modules (with express agreement of Course Convenor only)
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