As part of your PhD training, you will take a range of compulsory and optional courses. Specifically, you will take core courses in human geography, economic geography, environmental economics or environmental policy (depending on your programme) as well as relevant specialist MSc-level courses to take you to the leading edge of your chosen discipline and topic. You can also select from courses offered by LSE's Department of Methodology to help you prepare for your research.
Students who join the PhD programme after having completed either MSc Environmental Policy and Regulation or MSc Environment & Development cannot retake the same course or be waived the one unit of subject-specific training, They should instead discuss with their supervisor a relevant subject-specific training course available in Geography and Environment or elsewhere in the School. This selection is subject to supervisor and programme director approval.
Year One
(* denotes a half unit course)
Training courses
Compulsory (not examined)
Staff/Research Students Seminars
Provides background sessions for MPhil/PhD students in their first year of study. It also provides the forum in which first year full-time and second year part-time MPhil/PhD students must present their work in advance of submitting their major review documents.
Either
Compulsory (examined)
Environmental Regulation: Implementing Policy
Provides critical insights into the characteristics, processes and evolving dynamics of environmental policy, regulation and governance.
Or
Economic Development and the Environment (half unit) and Politics of Environment and Development (half unit)
Provides critical insights into a number of selected topics concerned with the interface between environment and development, at both the macro- and micro-scale. Provides insight into key themes at the intersection of development and environmental politics, including the applications of political ecology, critical development studies, and materialist human geography to topics in environment and development.
Relevant advanced research methods course(s) to the value of one unit from the following:
Fundamentals of Social Science Research Design*
Introduces students to the theoretical and practical foundations of empirical social science research.
Qualitative Research Methods*
Presents the fundamentals of qualitative research methods. It prepares students to design, carry out, report, read and evaluate qualitative research projects.
Doing Ethnography*
Examine how social order is produced as people go about their everyday interactions.
Non-Traditional Data: New Dimensions in Qualitative Research*
Examines methods for collecting and analysing data which are not primarily textual or linguistic, and how these can be integrated into qualitative research.
Special Topics in Qualitative Research: Introspection-based Methods in Social Research*
Looks at techniques such as narrative and episodic interviewing, free-association techniques, survey-based reconstruction and attitudes, critical incident techniques, loud-thinking protocols, experience sampling and self-tracking methods, ecological momentary assessment, self-confrontation interviewing, and 1st person situated video methods, and auto-ethnography and the ‘quantified self’.
Transferable skills courses
Compulsory (not examined)
Research Project Seminar
Presentations by research students of aspects of their own research, stressing problems of theory, methodology and techniques.
Year Two
Training courses
Compulsory (not examined)
Staff/Research Students Seminars
Provides background sessions for MPhil/PhD students in their first year of study. It also provides the forum in which first year full-time and second year part-time MPhil/PhD students must present their work in advance of submitting their major review documents.
Transferable skills courses
Compulsory (not examined)
Research Project Seminar
Presentations by research students of aspects of their own research, stressing problems of theory, methodology and techniques.
Year Three
Training courses
Compulsory (not examined)
Staff/Research Students Seminars
Provides background sessions for MPhil/PhD students in their first year of study. It also provides the forum in which first year full-time and second year part-time MPhil/PhD students must present their work in advance of submitting their major review documents.
Transferable skills courses
Compulsory (not examined)
Research Project Seminar
Presentations by research students of aspects of their own research, stressing problems of theory, methodology and techniques.
Year Four
Training courses
Compulsory (not examined)
Staff/Research Students Seminars
Provides background sessions for MPhil/PhD students in their first year of study. It also provides the forum in which first year full-time and second year part-time MPhil/PhD students must present their work in advance of submitting their major review documents.
Transferable skills courses
Compulsory (not examined)
Research Project Seminar
Presentations by research students of aspects of their own research, stressing problems of theory, methodology and techniques.
