I am currently recruiting for a fully-funded ESRC CASE 1+3 MSc. & PhD studentship in partnership with Manchester Carers Forum. The studentship is available to outstanding candidates wishing to commence their MSc. in September 2017 before moving onto the PhD studentship in September 2018. You will be based in the University of Manchester’s Morgan Centre for the Study of Everyday Lives, which is a world-leading institute for the study of personal life and for the development of creative qualitative methods. This is a great opportunity for a talented student to become part of a thriving research community, in one of the UK’s largest and most successful sociology groups.
So why this project? In recent decades dementia has grown in significance as a health condition, brought about by an ageing population, and presents challenges for understanding the complex changes which occur in the lives of people with dementia. For example, some people with dementia experience changes in sexuality and sexual activity. Such changes are characteristic of one form of dementia in particular, ‘behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia’ (bvFTD), and form one of the possible diagnostic criteria for this condition. This doesn’t always mean increases in sexual activity, sometimes it can be a reduction, as Robin describes in this video about her life with her husband. Robin’s video is a powerful example of a carer negotiating her experiences of changes in romance and love.
These kinds of changes are often explained to carers and people with dementia, whether in the medical context of diagnosis and treatment, or in the support literature provided by charities, as having been caused by chemical and structural differences in the brains of people with dementia. Of course, dementia does have important effects on the brain and it remains a terminal illness. So it is bound to cause changes in people’s capacities. However, our everyday understandings of love, sex and sexual identity do not always align with neurological explanations. This project explores how people with dementia, their carers, family and partners, make sense of changes in sexual and romantic lives by reference to the brain, or not. It examines the consequences for carers and people with dementia of explaining more of their lives through neurological evidence and ideas.
The project will use the personal life approach in sociology. This means understanding changes in the lives of carers and people with dementia as being fundamentally entangled phenomena, and exploring the ways in which the meaningfulness of everyday life is negotiated through interaction. The project will use creative qualitative methods to examine these issues. For more information on the kinds of methods the Morgan Centre works with, see some of our research projects. For example, you can see some of the sketches that Lynne Chapman has been doing as part of various research projects in the Centre, here, and in the picture below, which Lynne made as part of her work with me on my ‘Facets of Dementia’ project.
As an ESRC CASE studentship, the PhD scholarship will also involve close work with Manchester Carers Forum. The successful candidate will volunteer at the Carers Forum as a member of their team, working directly to support carers of people living with dementia. The PhD student will work there for 3 months of the year, broken down into a certain number of hours per week. S/he will also produce materials which are of use to the Carers Forum as an impact of the project, meaning that the PhD research will help to support carers in negotiating changes in sexuality, sex and romance.
Studentship Details: The successful candidate will be supervised by Dr Andrew Balmer and Prof. Brian Heaphy in the department of Sociology. This ESRC CASE 1+3 studentship will cover tuition fees for the 1-year MSc. Sociology and the 3-year PhD Sociology courses at the University of Manchester. It will also pay a stipend during these four years of approximately £14,057 per annum. Continuation of the award is subject to satisfactory performance.
Entry Requirements: Applicants must hold a Bachelors First Class (or in exceptional cases an Upper Second Class Honours) UK degree in Sociology (or a closely allied discipline such as Anthropology). Degrees in Psychology and Health Sciences will not be considered acceptable. The successful student will register first for the ESRC-recognised MSc. Sociology course before proceeding on to the PhD course. You must satisfy ESRC UK residential criteria to qualify for this studentship (see page 4 of the document here.)
Candidates meeting the following criteria will generally be given preference: above 70% in their Bachelors; some demonstrable knowledge of the sociological literature on sexuality; demonstrable interest in qualitative research methods, and the ‘relational’ approach to sociology.
How to apply
Applicants should email Dr Andrew Balmer, Andrew.Balmer@manchester.ac.uk with:
1) a full CV, (including most up-to-date grade transcripts) and;
2) a covering letter explaining why you think the project is interesting and how you are qualified to conduct it.
Please note that applying for this PhD studentship funding is a separate process to applying for entry to the Manchester PhD programme. The successful candidate will therefore also be required to fulfil the normal admissions criteria for the School of Social Sciences once they have been offered the NWSSDTP studentship.
The deadline for applications is 7th April 2017.
The project is a great opportunity not only to develop academic, research, writing and presentations skills through a PhD programme, but also to work with a charity for three to four years. We will be looking for someone who can produce a sophisticated, theoretically-informed, qualitative PhD, with interests which align with those of the Morgan Centre.
If you need some more information feel free to get in touch with me at: andrew.balmer@manchester.ac.uk.
@AndyBalmer 