Interdisciplinarity
We recognise that tackling many of society’s biggest challenges and pushing the limits of our understanding requires collaboration across the arts, humanities, law, and sciences. So, we’re embracing an interdisciplinary approach to research and education.
We want to support people to try out interdisciplinary ideas and approaches; to be bold, collaborate, create, and follow their curiosity.
Our academics are involved in multi-disciplinary research groups addressing everything from the criminalisation of poverty to the problem of plastic pollution, while our Liberal Arts and Sciences and joint honours programmes provide the novelty and flexibility attractive to both students and their future employers.
Foregrounding Indigenous concerns
Featured project
The Treatied Spaces Research Group is a collaborative international initiative to foreground Indigenous environmental, political and historical concerns in policy, law and society, and strengthen intercultural relationships.
Treatied Spaced research group
Bringing together the humanities
Bringing together the humanities
We’re breaking down barriers between disciplines and supporting collaborative networks, projects and facilities to unleash the power of the humanities to transform and inspire.
- The Treatied Spaces Research Group is a collaborative international initiative to foreground Indigenous environmental, political and historical concerns in policy, law and society, and strengthen intercultural relationships.
- Professor Karen McAuliffe’s research draws on research methodologies from sociology, anthropology, translation studies and linguistics to introduce new perspectives on the development of (EU) law through linguistic reasoning.
- Our state-of-the-art Birmingham Transformative Humanities Lab provides flexible workstations with motion-capture, VR and eye-tracking equipment, as well as editing suites and behavioural research facilities.
- The Centre for Material Cultures and Materialities brings together humanities scholars of all disciplines to explore the power and relations sustained and expressed in the University’s many cultural and archaeological collections.
- The Barber Institute of Fine Arts’ exhibition, Women in Power, blends history, anthropology, history of art and gender studies in its curation of historic coins featuring women.
Cross-college research projects
Cross-college research projects
We’re integrating the humanities into high-profile environmental, clinical and technological research projects across the University, including on mental health, plastic waste, AI and forestry.
- The Mental Health Humanities network draws together colleagues from across the University, seeking nuanced and urgent understandings of health and illness.
- Professor Karen Yeung works across law and the School of Computer Science in her research addressing ethics, governance and human rights in emerging technologies like AI.
- Professor Aleksandra Cavoski and Professor Robert Lee sit on numerous cross-college environmental research groups, including the Birmingham Plastics Network.
- Dr Merten Reglitz works with colleagues in Computer Science and law to try to establish a human right to free and quality internet access.
- Professor John Holmes is one of over 100 academics at the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research, working in collaboration with the Wyre Forest to explore the social and cultural importance of woodland.
- The Institute of Advanced Studies has funded many of our research projects, driving interdisciplinary innovation across the University.
National and global collaborations
National and global collaborations
We’re leading and working with local and international community groups, organisations, NGOs and policymakers in a wide range of important areas, including world heritage, criminal law and religion in business.
- A world-leader in innovative and sustainable approaches to heritage management, the International Centre for Heritage co-creates projects with local communities and consults for international organisations like UNESCO.
- Dr Marianne Wade collaborates with a national network of academics, NGOs and policymakers in her project, Is it a Crime to be Poor?, challenging the criminalisation of poverty in Britain.
- Professor Chris Thornhill studies the sociology of constitutions and the preconditions for them to emerge, and is consulting on constitutional reforms in Uzbekistan, Brazil and Poland.
- Dr Lucía Berro Pizzarossa leads an international research project to understand the legal implications of self-managed abortion.
- Professor Atina Krajewska’s leads a major AHRC-funded project in Brazil focused on enhancing access to sexual and reproductive healthcare for indigenous women in accordance with their cultural practices.