Overview
On our sociology programmes, you’ll research how societies change, develop and are challenged. You’ll learn about the latest social and cultural challenges from our internationally leading academics who offer global perspectives on areas such as race and racism, politics, social inequalities, urban life, colonialism, social movements, migration, digital media, free speech, comedy, gender, and popular culture. We are rated the best Sociology department in London in the 2024 National Student survey, 6th best in the UK for our teaching.
Sociology at Brunel supports you to develop your critical skills to analyse contemporary society and culture from a global perspective. In your first year you will be trained in both classical and the latest sociological and cultural theories. As you progress into your second and third year you will develop your critical skills and follow your particular interests. In your final year, you will design and carry out your own bespoke research project analysing real world issues supported by your supervisor. This can be a theoretical or practical dissertation, so you can work to your own strengths.
Depending on the modules you choose, you may have the option go on fieldtrips where you will be able to apply your learning to current issues and broaden your theoretical imagination. Previous fieldtrips have included: Barbican; British Board of Film Classification; London Migration Museum; Museum of Comedy; Museum of London; regeneration areas (e.g. Soho, Smithfield); and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
On the three-year version of our degree you will have the option to undertake short-term work placements during your course or via the Brunel Summer Internship Programme, but if you would prefer a more substantial placement, you can apply for our four-year Sociology (with Placement) programmes instead. You will graduate with valuable work experience to enhance your employment prospects. Our sociology students have undertaken placements at a variety of companies including Deluxe Entertainment, the Disney Channel, PR organisations, the Home Office, British Youth Council, Citizens Advice Bureau and the Department of Work and Pensions.
Our unique mix of theory, policy and empirical research provides you with a wide range of career options when you graduate. Our alumni are working at prestigious organisations like Gucci, Barclays, Odd Muse or the NHS in roles such as marketing, advertising, copywriting as working in the music and fashion industries, human resources management, journalism and social media, social work, teaching and the prison service. Three years after graduation, over 93% of our students are in employment or further study, compared to the sector median of 84.7%, and our graduates earn on average £3,000 more per year than the sector mean (Discover Uni, 2023).
Course content
This innovative course will enable you to develop specific skills in the practical methods associated with sociology, as well as exploring in-depth the major issues and approaches within sociology and its related disciplines.
Compulsory
- Culture & Society
An introduction to the study of classical and contemporary approaches and methods in the study of culture and society via Cultural Studies. The module presents the historical development, key debates and methodological approaches in Cultural Studies. It will provide opportunity for critical reflection in these areas.
- Digital Media Landscapes
The module introduces students to a range of concepts and issues that underpin the ways in which everyday social life is shaped by the digital technologies. Students will examine the implications of digital media environments for societies and journalism. Focus is placed upon the relationship between states, societies and the media in the digital age.
- Global London
Through focusing on the concept of ‘Global London’, this module shows you how the social sciences can enable you to better understand their lived social environment. It introduces you to the techniques used by a range of disciplines within social science for gaining and validating knowledge of the social world and equips you with an academic skill base appropriate for university study.
- Global Sociology
This module will survey current debates around the idea of global sociology. It will address contrasting theories of global sociology as well as specific issues raised by the subject including the debates around the idea of sociology as a global discipline as opposed to one that takes nation-states as its starting point of analysis.
- Key Ideas in Sociology
Key themes in sociology are explored through theoretical and empirical analysis. You will do this by examining some of the most important ideas of leading sociologists and critically engage with their theories through empirical illustrations.
- Power, Inequality and Society
This module unpacks the definition, origins, evolution and trajectory of inequality in society through multiple empirical and theoretical angles. It also examines different manifestations of inequality including gender, income, educational and intersectional dynamics. Finally, it explores social mobility and how the state, charities as well as labour groups work towards redistribution of opportunities and resources.
Compulsory
- Global London
Through focusing on the concept of ‘Global London’, this module shows you how the social sciences can enable you to better understand their lived social environment. It introduces you to the techniques used by a range of disciplines within social science for gaining and validating knowledge of the social world and equips you with an academic skill base appropriate for university study.
- Researching Your World
This module provides an advanced understanding of research methodologies, with a particular focus on data analysis. Equipping students with an understanding and appreciation of the important theoretical paradigms that underpin qualitative and quantitative social and communications research traditions. Furnishing students with the tools and skills required to conduct and evaluate their own empirical social and communications research.
- Sociology of Everyday Life: Issues in Contemporary Culture
In this module you will consider the meanings of ordinary, ‘everyday’ processes and actions in society, by examining what everyday life consists of and the relevant academic debates and theories around it. The module will encourage you to reflect on your own everyday life through the lense of power, identity and gender in wider socio-cultural contexts.
Optional
- Body, Media and Society
In this module we will examine many different aspects of embodiment and bodies in society, with a focus on the role of media in representing, stereotyping, and medicalising different kinds of bodies.
- Climate Politics
This module aims to enable students to attain a comprehensive understanding of key concepts and theories in the politics and political economy of climate change. It will provide students with resources to assist them in making informed judgments on a range of questions and debates.
- Crime and Deviance in Society
An introduction to notions of deviance in terms of othering, stigma, and criminalisation. It will consider the changing nature of deviance, how perceptions of deviance change over time, and how these perceptions impact on individuals and communities. Deviance will be studied through a number of different lenses that consider deviance as a part of a process of oppression but also a source of resistance.
- Colonialism, Migration and Global Racism
This module explores the concept, meaning and practices of ‘race’, ethnicity, racialization, and global racisms. It identifies how ‘race’ and racism have evolved over time, and in different contexts - both nationally in the contemporary UK as well as in other parts of the world.
- Digital Culture
This module considers the shape of new media technologies such as iPhones – it explores how new developments in media technology have changed the basis of contemporary social life and culture. This module will examine some of the key transformations that are taking place through digital culture.
- Ethnography in South Asia
This module explores classic anthropological themes -- such as community, class, kinship, gender, and globalisation -- through an indepth focus on a particular ethnographic region: South Asia and its diasporas.
- Ethnography of a Selected Region
In this module you will grasp the interplay between ethnographic observations during fieldwork and theory building during the write up process. You will examine key cultural issues for the region, covering topics such as religion, nationalism, economics, and the interplay of politics and memory.
- Gangs, Street Culture and Crime
Students will be introduced to the history and the various theoretical debates surrounding the nature of street gangs and street cultural formation. Using a wide range of criminological and empirical research, the causes of gangs and street culture, and the responses to this global phenomenon will be considered.
- Gender, Sexuality and Feminism
This module will introduce students to core ideas in feminism via the key concepts of gender and sexuality. It will develop students’ understandings of social structures, human cultures, and economic inequalities and political relationships. The course will offer theoretical tools and historical insights into gendered, feminised, and sexualised socio-cultural worlds.
- Global Communication
Examine the ways in which the globalisation of communication has transformed social, political, and economic relations. The following themes will be addressed in this module: the state, economy, power, globalisation, nationalism, identity, digitisation, culture and consumerism, media markets, public relations and politics, and political economy of communication.
- Kinship, Sex and Gender
An introduction to some of the key social anthropological literature on kinship, gender and sexuality including universalities and particularities in the construction of gender roles and different theoretical paradigms on gender and sexuality.
- Popular Culture and Creative Industries
This module explores how meanings are developed through contemporary cultural representations, practices and processes, with a focus on creativity and the creative industries sector. It examines popular culture and the rise of the creative and cultural sector in late modernity drawing on relevant sociological, media and cultural studies debates and theories.
- Understanding Childhood and Youth
This module will introduce you to the study of childhood and youth as they are constructed and practiced in different social, cultural and economic settings. The first section focuses on children, looking first at how ideas of childhood are constructed by adults, the second section is devoted to young people.
- Unity and Cultural Diversity
In this module students will gain an understanding of the texts of political theorists who focus on the issue of fostering unity among the culturally diverse citizens of a modern polity. Students will also gain an understanding of case studies that help to illuminate the difficulties of fostering unity among the culturally diverse citizens of a modern polity.
Compulsory
- Advanced Research Skills for Sociology and Communication
Optional
- Apocalypse! Crisis and Society
Explore the social & political significance of representations of national and global crises, and public perceptions of controversies. Students analyse dystopian popular and scientific discourses that dwell on disorder and catastrophe. Indicative content includes risk, uncertainty, globalisation, the environment, disease, capitalism. Public understanding, perception and engagement with popular and scientific controversies and notions of crisis.
- Cities, Power and Social Change
An introduction to urban sociology and will develop the students understanding of urban development, cultures, and representation. The course will offer theoretical tools and provide practical applications for the relationship between space, culture, and social life in contemporary cities.
- Comedy, the Media & Society
This module provides a serious critical consideration of the role of comedy in contemporary media and society. This role is explored in relation to comedy’s institutional, historical, social and textual conventions. The module also explores comedy as it exists in a broad range of texts and examines the role of comedy in the construction and transmission of social difference and issues of identity.
- Crisis and Critique
The main aim of the module is to provide students with an understanding of some of the major socio-political crises in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the ways in which they have been understood by political theorists.
- Digital Audiences and Identities
This module provides students with a critical overview of key debates about media audiences and identities. Students will engage with key contemporary debates about media influence and be able to apply theoretical concepts to a range of contemporary sites.
- Drugs, Crime and Criminal Justice
Examine historical and current debates concerning the criminalisation of a variety of drugs. This will introduce students to debates about the impact of the criminalisation of drugs on marginalised communities. Students will be introduced to debates about global drug markets and the changing nature of those markets over time.
- Global Migration
Equips students with an understanding of the key concepts in global migration including the causes and consequences of migration, national and international responses to migration and the diversity of migrant flows within a global context, using cases from both Global North and Global South contexts.
- Home, Housing and Social Harm
This module introduces students to a number of questions concerning notions of home and housing in contemporary society, and how sociologists and criminologists should confront these issues as they occupy a central place in political, public, and mediated debates. It explores sociological and criminological debates around housing and the home, looking at the relationship between self, society, and state.
- Marx and the Critique of Political Economy
This module involves reading several key works by Marx, culminating in several weeks on Das Kapital
- Lawyers, Guns and Money: Making the Modern World System
This module will explore issues raised by historical and political sociology regarding the development of the modern world-system. In particular the course will focus upon the rise to dominance of Europe in the building of the modern world-system and the explanations offered for this.
- Making the Social
An introduction to core concepts in social theory. The emphasis is on concepts through which students can relate to the worlds they inhabit and the lives they live, connecting these to a broad canvas: the diversity of social existence and the sweep of human history. The focus is on basic building blocks of social existence.
- Media Empires
The module explores the role played by the media in the development and maintenance of ‘empires’, and examines how we can understand media ‘empires’ via key concepts such as ‘media/cultural imperialism’, ‘public diplomacy’ and ‘intellectual property rights’.
- Social Media and Society
This module will enable students to critically engage and analyse the historical and current impact of social media on social relations and contemporary culture. It will allow students to develop a critical understanding of social media in the context of broader changes in the media landscape, and how it impacts identity, power and everyday life.
- Social Reproduction and Care
This module aims to introduce students to theoretical debates in feminism about social reproduction and care. It will offer a broad history of such debates and update these with new theoretical interventions in this field that have arisen in recent times, particularly in the context of the pandemic.
- Sociological Career Development
This module will provide students with a critical overview of working in industries that draw on or are connected with sociological knowledge from direct encounters with industry professionals, companies or institutions. Drawing on a variety of formats, the module will support students’ understanding of, competence and confidence in working independently in a professional manner appropriate to ‘sociological’ industries.
- Sociology Dissertation
The final year dissertation provides undergraduates with the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities to plan, design and execute a Sociology research project.
- Sociology Major Final Project
The final year project enables the student to demonstrate their abilities to plan, design and execute a project that involves a practice-based research element via the production of a sociological-media artefact.
This course can be studied undefined undefined, starting in undefined.
This course has a placement option. Find out more about work placements available.
Please note that all modules are subject to change.
Read more about the structure of undergraduate degrees at Brunel.
Careers and your future
Sociologists are in increasing demand. A sociology degree is your passport to a wide variety of roles in many professions such as marketing, advertising, the music and fashion industries, human resources management, journalism and social media, and many more. Through our courses, you’ll develop transferrable skills such as the ability to interpret and analyse data, critically reflect, and communicate to diverse audiences in different environments.
As well as gaining excellent academic knowledge throughout your studies, emphasis is placed on gaining transferable employment skills. You will develop communication, report writing and presentation skills to an excellent level, equipping you for a range of subsequent professional careers.
Brunel’s Professional Development Centre is a dedicated service that are committed to increasing our students' employability, helping you to develop the skills and experience you need to stand out in the job market. They will help you with placements, CV writing and interviews during your time with us, and will still be on-hand to help you for two years after you graduate.
UK entry requirements
2024/25 entry
- GCE A-level ABB-BBC.
- BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma DMM in any subject.
- BTEC Level 3 Diploma DM in any subject with an A-Level at grade C.
- BTEC Level 3 Subsidiary Diploma M in any subject with A-Levels grades BB.
- International Baccalaureate Diploma 29 points.
- Obtain a minimum of 112 UCAS tariff points in the Access to HE Diploma with 45 credits at Level 3.
- T levels : Merit overall
A minimum of five GCSEs are required, including GCSE Mathematics grade C or grade 4 and GCSE English Language grade C or grade 4 or GCSE English Literature grade B or grade 5.
Brunel University London is committed to raising the aspirations of our applicants and students. We will fully review your UCAS application and, where we’re able to offer a place, this will be personalised to you based on your application and education journey.
Please check our Admissions pages for more information on other factors we use to assess applicants as well as our full GCSE requirements and accepted equivalencies in place of GCSEs.
EU and International entry requirements
English language requirements
- IELTS: 6.5 (min 5.5 in all areas)
- Pearson: 59 (59 in all subscores)
- BrunELT: 63% (min 55% in all areas)
- TOEFL: 90 (min R18, L17, S20, W17)
You can find out more about the qualifications we accept on our English Language Requirements page.
Should you wish to take a pre-sessional English course to improve your English prior to starting your degree course, you must sit the test at an approved SELT provider for the same reason. We offer our own BrunELT English test and have pre-sessional English language courses for students who do not meet requirements or who wish to improve their English. You can find out more information on English courses and test options through our Brunel Language Centre.
Please check our Admissions pages for more information on other factors we use to assess applicants. This information is for guidance only and each application is assessed on a case-by-case basis. Entry requirements are subject to review, and may change.
Fees and funding
2024/25 entry
UK
£9,250 full-time
£1,385 placement year
International
£19,430 full-time
£1,385 placement year
Fees quoted are per year and may be subject to an annual increase. Home undergraduate student fees are regulated and are currently capped at £9,250 per year; any changes will be subject to changes in government policy. International fees will increase annually, by no more than 5% or RPI (Retail Price Index), whichever is the greater.
More information on any additional course-related costs.
See our fees and funding page for full details of undergraduate scholarships available to Brunel applicants.
Please refer to the scholarships pages to view discounts available to eligible EU undergraduate applicants.
Teaching and learning
You'll be taught by world leading experts in your field of study, and have the opportunity to interact with fellow students on London’s leading campus University.
Your programme will consist of various learning and studying activities, including lectures, seminars and discussions. Students will study six modules during two terms across the academic year (4 modules and a dissertation in the third year). Each module will have on average two-to-three hours in person contact time per week in lectures, seminars and workshops in the teaching terms. There will also be the opportunity for a further six hours per week to seek guidance during module lecturers’ feedback and consultation hours. Additionally, students can seek support in individual meetings with their personal tutors, both on campus and online. There will also be regular cohort meetings and student society events, at both programme and departmental levels. Field trips and excursions to support students’ learning will be organised throughout the year.
All lectures, seminars, cohort meetings and other social activities will occur in person on the Brunel campus. It is expected that students will regularly attend these events, as sustained engagement with a learning community is a central dimension of the Brunel experience. Online provision of some activities will be made available when it is appropriate to the learning outcomes of your programme.
Students are strongly advised to purchase core texts from module reading lists, although copies are also available via Brunel Library.
Access to a laptop or desktop PC is required for joining online activities, completing coursework and digital exams, and a minimum specification can be found here.
We have computers available across campus for your use and laptop loan schemes to support you through your studies. You can find out more here.
You’ll benefit from lectures, group tutorials, workshops and seminars, as well as one-to-one supervision in your final year project.
Group seminars allow you to learn in smaller groups and to partake in discussions with your peers. Should you need guidance on the module, coursework and any other matters that may wish to discuss, module tutors are available for one-to-one tutorials.
You'll also undertake research methods modules which include exploring methods such as surveys, interviewing techniques and discourse analysis. You'll have more freedom and less direction over the design and implementation of projects as you progress through the course.
Should you need any non-academic support during your time at Brunel, the Student Support and Welfare Team are here to help.
Assessment and feedback
Assessment will be through completing coursework essays and projects, seminars, producing films, documentaries (for Sociology and Digital Media students), journals, blogs, and presentations. Some modules are assessed on coursework only, some by (seen or unseen) examination only, and some by a combination.
Although the first year of your degree does not count towards your final degree mark, you must pass this level to continue with your course. Your second year modules are worth one third of your final result and the Third year modules are worth two third.