PSI Research Clusters
The School of Political and Social Inquiry (PSI) researchers are grouped into research clusters.What is a research cluster?
Research clusters are made up of researchers with shared interests and who are working together in various ways. The clusters are interdisciplinary, combining the complementary strength of different perspectives, approaches and skill sets to produce high quality research. Imagine it as a cluster of galaxies. Many dozens or thousands of galaxies are held together by mutual gravitation to form a cluster. A cluster of galaxies has the capability to shape its own appearance and it has the synergy to attract other members of the galaxy group and expand its size.
PSI has six disciplines in the school: Anthropology, Behavioural Studies, Politics, Sociology, Criminology and Women's Studies and Gender Research.
The aim of the research cluster is to build on the disciplines’ synergy to enhance the interdisciplinary research capacity of PSI.
There are seven research clusters in PSI:
The clusters are drivers in developing PSI interdisciplinary research and they aim to:
- Meet regularly and contribute to the development of a community of scholars
- Develop collaborative research projects
- Write collaborative publications
- Apply for nationally competitive grants
- Enhance PSI profile
- Attract Higher Degree by Research and honours students
- Mentor academic and research only staff as well as postgraduates
- Initiative inter-faculty and inter-university collaborations
- Develop further research groups for national benchmarking and other research quality exercises.