Geographical Sciences (Human Geography)

Details of the PGR program structure derive from the wider faculty and University regulations and are set out in the School of Geography Handbook. The handbook is updated each year and a copy can be requested from the postgraduate student administrator (geog-pgadmis@bristol.ac.uk).

An upper second-class honours degree in a relevant subject or an equivalent qualification and a master's qualification from a UK university (or equivalent).

The school welcomes applicants with an interest in utilising ESRC and UKRI secondary datasets in their research projects.

The School of Geographical Sciences, like many other schools and departments across the University, is committed to efforts to decolonise our curricula and transform our research and teaching as part of these efforts. We especially welcome applicants interested in supporting this work, and we encourage applicants from diverse backgrounds, life experiences, and geographies to apply.

See international equivalent qualifications on the International Office website.

There are four main Human Geography research groups:

• Geographies of Political Economy
  Research expertise includes cities and urban change, neoliberalism, globalisation, governmentality, regulation and analytical political economy, critical political economy, social stratification, sustainable development, global development, rural development, livelihoods, coloniality, migration, and agroecology.
• Historical and Cultural Geography
  Main interests include intellectual history, historical geographies of nature, landscape, and representation, contemporary social theory and philosophy, embodiment and materiality, posthumanisms, postcolonialism, decoloniality, feminist geographies, historical demographies of the UK, environmental history, ethics and subjectivity.
• States, Economies & Societies (weblink under construction)
• Members of the States, Economies & Societies research group apply a spatial lens to understanding a wide range of social phenomena and public policies. Key themes include inequalities across class, gender, race, ethnicity, and geography; governance practices; urban and rural settlement dynamics; population change and politics; public health, medicine and biopolitics; globalisation and economic geography; and sustainability. Our research contributes to both academic and policy debates across these themes with group members actively engaged with a range of non-academic stakeholders including policymakers at local, national, and international scales, NGOs, and community organisations.
• Quantitative Spatial Science
  Research focuses on quantitative analysis of social, housing, health and political data. Expertise in methods including multi-level modelling, GIS, spatial statistics, spatial time-series analysis, ecological inference and non-linear systems, geo-computation, and machine learning.