Study for your PhD with CLaSP scholars

The Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) at Queen Mary University of London invites applications for doctoral programmes in the School of Business and Management and School of Geography starting in September 2025. In exceptional cases, a January 2026 start may also be possible. The Centre offers a collegial environment for PhD research and supports its existing cohort of PhD students towards academic and other professional development needs.

 Areas of specialization

PhD supervisors at CLaSP have interdisciplinary research expertise in a wide range of areas including Business, Development Studies, International Political Economy, Critical Management Studies, Economic Geography, Political Ecology, History, and regional expertise in the Global South (particularly Latin America, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East), Europe and the UK. 

We particularly welcome students wishing to pursue research on the following (or related) themes:

• Labour regimes, nature, and global production/global value chains

• Divisions of labour, value capture, globalisation, and management

• Political economy of ‘sustainable development’, extractivism, and energy transitions in the Global South and North

• The sea, maritime industries, geopolitical economy/ecology

• Urban infrastructures, water politics

• Business politics and multinational corporations 

• Global ecologies of work in ‘green frontier’ decarbonising industries

• Hidden forms of work, unpaid labour, and environmental stewardship

• Ethnographic approaches to informal(ized) work

• Platform economy and digital work/labour

• Social reproduction and gender

• Subaltern studies of race 

• The transition to capitalism, environmental history, and racialisation

• Histories of international political economy/political ecology

• Histories of labour, production, and trade politics

• Local and global labour histories of East London

• The military, security, and development

• Workplace conflict, class composition, political organisation, and capitalist restructuring in post-war Europe

• Forms of pacification: democracy, depoliticization, and marketisation in late capitalism

• Financialization, particularly of labour, health, housing, development, and/or the green transition

• Philanthropy, philanthrocapitalism, and sustainable finance

• Migration, remittances, and development

• Digital and micro-finance, debt, and social reproduction

• Rent and rentierisation in theory and practice

• Neoliberalism and post-neoliberal policy agendas

• Creative industries and cultural labour

• Social movements, activism, and intersectionality 

• Methods in histories of art, design, visual and material cultures vis-a-vis any of the above areas

• Participatory research methods, action, and art 

• Computational methods in research on business and society

Expressions of Interest

It is recommended that you contact a potential CLaSP supervisor directly with a CV and a brief research proposal before making a formal application. You should contact supervisors as soon as possible in the academic year to allow them time to share feedback on your application before submission, especially if you are also applying for funding.

Funding

PhD scholarships for UK and international students are available through the ESRC’s LISS DTP, as well as several QMUL studentships. QMUL funding deadlines are typically in late January, but please check for updates here. Please note that funding is highly competitive.

Other details and application links for a PhD at the School of Business and Management can be found here and for a PhD at the School of Geography can be found here.