Collaborative doctoral programmes
We encourage the establishment of collaborative doctoral studentship projects, proposed by a university-based academic, to work in collaboration with an organisation outside of Higher Education.
The AHRC-funded CDA scheme and the ESCR-funded CASE scheme offer academics and non-HEI organisations from the private, public or third sectors the opportunity to develop a bespoke, three-year PhD project with funding awarded to the host HEI to provide the PhD researcher with a stipend for the duration of the PhD.
The awards are intended to encourage and develop collaboration and partnerships, providing opportunities for doctoral researchers to develop research with direct impact onto an industry organisation and the wider community, while enhancing their professional profile.
The projects also encourage and establish networks and connections toward the development of long-term benefits for all collaborating partners, providing access to resources and materials, knowledge and expertise that may not otherwise have been available.
See our Introduction to Collaborative Doctoral Programmes presentation for more information:
You can also view these slides in a single, scrollable HTML page.
Application process and support
The AHRC CDA scheme and the ESRC CASE scheme have a similar structure but slightly different processes. The application will need to be submitted to the NWCDTP for the former and the NWSSDTP for the latter. For more detailed information on the respective processes and deadlines see the relevant websites:
In addition to the support offered by the two DTPs on their processes and requirements, the Faculty of Humanities has established a new internal process to support academics looking to submit an application to the two schemes. The aim of this internal process is to provide bespoke support and specific feedback on draft proposals.
Academic colleagues interested in applying are invited to complete the online Expression of Interest form. We will then contact colleagues who express an interest in further support.
Recent Awards in the Faculty
Manchester Citizen Advice Bureau
Financial insecurity in the UK: Debt, Decision-making and resilience amongst low-income families
The aim of this interdisciplinary, mixed method PhD is to develop an understanding of how people on low incomes manage their finances across the life-course. Working closely with the CAB, the PhD will provide a valuable contribution to the understanding of everyday financial insecurity and decision making. The project will provide much needed evidence about everyday financial decision making at the individual and household scale in the UK. The PhD is especially timely given the significant reforms to the UK welfare system including tax credits.
PI: Dr Kingsley Purdam (SoSS)
Wildlife Trust Lancashire
Mosslands in early modern Lancashire, carbon, community and conservation, 1500/1800
This PhD project is an exploration of the historical decline of mossland landscapes in the north-west of England between 1500 and 1800. I focus on three core themes; energy transformations and the industrial revolution, the management of peat as a fragile common-pool resource, and finally the historic characters of a changing mossland environment landscape. Collaboration with the Lancashire Wildlife Trust will enable this project to make two further contributions; engaging local communities with the history of their environment, and providing historical evidence to inform the reintroduction of locally extinct species.
PI: Prof. Sasha Handley (SALC)
Manchester Communication Academy
Living socioeconomic and educational 'Disadvantage': learning from young people and their experiences of an innovative school-led model of provision
This research will consist of an in-depth case study of an innovative school-led model for intervening in the interconnected issue of socioeconomic disadvantage and educational disadvantage for young people in a school: 'SID support'. This is being developed and implemented by staff in the Social Investment Department (SID) of Manchester Communication Academy (MCA), which serves 11-16-year-old pupils in a high-poverty inner-city area.
Now in its second year, the model involves SID-staff working intensively in partnership with learners giving cause for concern and their carers/families/peers, as a unit, to understand: (i) the complex webs of social determinants and interconnected relationships shaping the learner situation and his/her identity and agency; and (ii) how learners/families/peers/MCA, connected to other professional services, can work together to intervene in ways which account for the complexities of the learner's situation.
Bespoke support plans are developed and implemented drawing upon MCA's wider partnerships and actions to tackle potential underlying forms of socioeconomic and related educational disadvantage - from addressing economic disadvantage, for example, food poverty, to supporting educational disadvantage that relates to both social and cultural and material elements of socioeconomic disadvantage, for example, university access.
PI: Dr Carlo Raffo (SEED)
St Patrick’s Teaching School
Lessons from 'odds-beating' schools: understanding how schools serving disadvantaged areas achieve good outcomes
In recent decades, affluent countries world-wide have sought to improve the quality of their schools. But despite some gains, the poorest learners, living in the poorest areas, are still doing systematically least well (OECD 2017). In England, policymakers have started to think about these spatial concentrations of poor outcomes as 'cold spots'. With reference to schooling, the Department for Education (DfE) and National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) have defined these as areas with the highest levels of disadvantage, where schools face the most challenging circumstances, and where additional supports are needed to improve schools and children's lives (DfE and NCTL 2018). Recent efforts to "grow support in cold spot areas" have included the creation of Teaching Schools, defined as "strong schools led by strong leaders that work with others to provide high quality training, development and support" (DfE and NCTL, 2018).
Distinctively, this approach seeks to harness the expertise of schools which Campbell-Wilcox (2017) terms 'odds-beating' - ie. consistently achieving good outcomes, through equitable practices, in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Given Ofsted's concerns that some schools are securing improvements by exacerbating inequalities through excluding the most disadvantaged learners, learning from schools which appear more equitable is especially important. In response, this study seeks to learn more about how schools which appear 'odds-beating' succeed, and to use this knowledge to inform Teaching Schools' work. Specifically, it will explore how these schools: understand disadvantages in their local contexts and student populations; respond to these in practice; and what it is about the nature of their response that supports their success.
Simply, little research has sought to understand schools which appear odds-beating as whole, complex, contextualised, multi-faceted organisations, and in sufficient detail to explore the potential transferability of their approaches - in whole or in part. This may leave Teaching Schools with few reference points beyond their own practices, and constrained by the limitations inherent in these, when thinking about what schools in cold spots can do to improve. Explicitly addressing these issues, this study has been co-designed with St Patrick's Teaching School, which is committed to developing high-quality research-informed support, and led by a DfE-appointed National Leader of Education. It will ask three overarching questions:
- How do schools which appear odds-beating understand disadvantage in their local contexts and student populations?
- How do they respond to this?
- What is it about the nature of their response that supports their success?
The CASE student will work closely with the CASE partner to establish the triad.
PI: Dr Kirsten Kerr (SEED)
British Council Ukraine
Youth Engagement in Young Democracies: Assessing the Patterns, Processes and Impact of Youth Engagement in Ukraine
Economic globalization, marginalization, and precarity have contributed to mobility, mass protest, and insurgency. Young people play a significant role in sustaining protest movements, and represent a core demographic in internal displacement and migration. Analysts have pointed to the interdependence of these two forms of mobilisation, and theoretical expectations of their drivers overlap significantly. The relationship between them has been theorized at the macro (De Haas & Sigona 2012), and individual levels (Hirschman 1993), yet the literatures on protest and migration tend to be discrete. This project takes Ukraine as a case to consider critically the relationship between youth engagement, protest and migration at moments of heightened political crisis and conflict.
This includes analysis of the micro-foundations of mobilisation as mass protest and migration, in contextual and structural perspective, and exploration of the dynamics between them. What motivates and mobilises post-communist youth to become socially and politically engaged? In displacement how do people participate in the political and civic life of their home? Further, how does youth mobilisation in, across, and out of Ukraine relate to democratisation and peace development?
PI: Dr Olga Onuch (SoSS)
Bank of England
Did the Bank of England provide lender of last resort facilities to the private sector in the first 150 years of its existence?
The research question being asked is to what extent the Bank of England developed its private lending business and in times of crisis provided lender of last resort facilities to the private sector in the first 150 years of its existence. Using the modern statistical and economical models in this brand new data will bring new insights about how to act in modern financial crisis situations because we must look at the policy successes as well as failures. Lovell argued that the Bank operated as a lender of last resort in the second half of the 18th century. This was based on data on the Banks revenue from bill discounting business which Clapham collected for his two-volume history of the Bank. But this general hypothesis has not really been looked at again in any detail for this period using material from the Bank of England archives, in contrast with the period after 1844.
The main question is how did this business evolve and did the Bank develop techniques for monitoring its counterparties and providing emergency liquidity in a crisis. To what extent is this evident in the sophistication of the bookkeeping done by the Bank? This ranged from the use of Britannia as a 'symbol of virtue' to the use of open-plan offices and banking halls where the ledgers were on display, something which enabled it to demonstrate publicly its assiduous bookkeeping.
PI: Prof Akos Valentinya (SoSS)
NEST
Precarious employment and pension planning
This collaborative studentship between the University of Manchester and NEST investigates the pension planning of precarious workers, providing new and urgently required sociological insights into how this growing segment of the population is managing an increasingly privatised and individualised pension system.
This proposed study will investigate how precarious workers manage their economic insecurity in the long term through asking the following questions: How do precarious workers on low pay conceptualise money in its different forms? Do people undertake any form of mental accounting as between these forms of money, especially debt versus saving? What is the role of class, socio-economic status, occupational skill level, and education level in influencing financial decision making for precarious workers? How do current employment characteristics such as work, pay or sector, influence financial decision making and pension planning? How important are transitory employment and other insecurities such as housing, as factors? How do individual characteristics interact with workplace, advice, family and partnership contexts to influence financial decision making and pension planning? How do those in precarious employment understand the respective roles of government, employer, financial advisers, themselves and their family and friends in influencing their own financial and pension decisions? How do those in precarious employment embed thinking about their possible pensions into their own life course narratives and identities.
PI: Prof Debora Price (SOSS)
Oxfam GB
The causes and consequences of precarious work for women: A city region study of Greater Manchester
This CASE project, based at the Work and Equalities Institute (WEI), looks at the increasingly widespread precarious work in labour markets, with a focus on the care and hospitality sectors in the UK. The project, led by PhD Candidate Eva Herman, aims to better understand the causes and consequences of precarious work and how it affects men and women in different ways.
Read more about this project in "Embedded in Policy", by Eva Herman, in the AMBS Magazine, n. 7 (pp. 20-23).
PI: Prof Jill Rubery (AMBS)
