Graduate Study Seminar

This week we had two days with our 2014 cohort of our Graduate Study Seminar. As staff we always leave these seminars buzzing with the new ideas and possibilities that we hear from our members as they assemble their writing and research plans or begin to wrestle with the ethical and practical questions of doing fieldwork as contextual theologians.

Contextual theologians are simply theologians who use context as their starting point. That means that nearly all our PhD students and researchers find themselves needing to set up surveys and questionnaires.

Currently we have someone researching the way the rural church adapts to not have a priest in every Church of England parish. This means, of course, conversations with lay and ordained people but who to ask and what are the right questions to ask?

Another PhD student is looking at the way asylum seekers in a particular northern town are dealing with cultures of hospitality that are different to their own. Here there are huge questions of translation, agency, and the potential for exploitation. And the big question of who is doing the theology: the migrant, the researcher, or both?

Graduate Study Seminar

Our Graduate Study Seminar brings together three streams of learner whose contact with us at the Urban Theology Unit overlaps as they resource each other in order to resource the wider church.

Post Graduate Researchers
We have people who take part in the seminar but do not have one to one supervision. These might be prospective PhD students, Post-doctoral theologians who are in ministry, or people who simply want to study but are not interested in getting a qualification. Some are also doing their MA Dissertation having successfully completed the Post-Graduate diploma. The current fee for this is £200 per year for four 24 hour sessions.

Prospective Authors
We also have people who want supervision for book writing and need supervision but are not reading for a PhD. They receive the same amount of contact time as the Post Graduate Researches plus one to one supervisions and written feedback. The current fee for this is

£1,000 per year.

PhD Students
We also have our PhD Students who receive the same amount of contact time and supervision plus even more written and oral feedback and, of course, the accreditation of the University of Manchester when they successfully complete. The current fees are published here.

We want to have a door as wide open as possible to anyone who wants to study, reflect, and re-imagine their discipleship and we hope that our three streams of post-graduate learning make that possible.

Many people wonder about doing a PhD but it seems like such a foreign land that it can be intimidating. If you have a passion for your subject and an wonder if you might be in a position to do an MA, PhD or other research with us then please get in touch.

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