This award is not running in 2024.
For 2023 entry, LSE offered three doctoral studentships for PhD study in any Department for research addressing ‘Analysing and Challenging Inequalities’.
Topics covered any aspect of economic, social, cultural and/or political inequality, in any part of the world, at any time, addressing whether, why and how such inequalities are intensifying. Students could propose to use quantitative, qualitative, archival, or mixed methods.
Students applied to specific Departments and are also affiliated to LSE’s International Inequalities Institute. They are part of a dynamic research culture exploring the links between the economic dimensions of inequalities with their social, cultural and political aspects to systematically assess whether and how inequalities might be hardening in mutually reinforcing ways. They join five previous cohorts of LSE-funded ‘Analysing and Challenging Inequalities’ Scholars developing research on this theme and participate in the Institute’s doctoral programme.
As well as being supervised by experts in their home Departments, they are actively mentored by a group of leading scholars with proven records of research on inequality.
Doctoral Programme Participants 2022-2023
Jakob Dirksen is an Analysing and Challenging Inequalities Scholar based at the Department of Social Policy. His research focuses on the measurement of welfare, poverty, and inequality. Among his key research interests are the development and use of conceptually and normatively sound metrics for evidence-based policy-making. Jakob is also Research and Policy Officer with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative within the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford, Lecturer at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, and Seminar Leader at the Blavatnik School of Government. He studied Liberal Arts & Sciences (BA), Political Philosophy (MA), and Public Policy and Human Development (MSc & MPP) with Social Protection specialisation in Germany, Spain, and at the United Nations University.
Previously, Jakob held research and teaching positions with the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and worked for the German Federal Foreign Office. He regularly works with governments, UN agencies, and other partners around the world on the development and use of prosperity and poverty indices as yardstick indicators and policy tools. Among his most recent publications are reports for and with the World Health Organization and the United Nations Development Programme, calls for action and policy briefs for the G7, as well as academic articles and book chapters on multidimensional poverty, health equity, child poverty, and metrics of welfare and development.
Hobeth Martínez Carrillo is a PhD student based at the Sociology department. He works under the co-supervision of Professor Mike Savage and Dr. George Kunnath, researching on rural elites and their role in the reproduction of socioeconomic inequalities. Hobeth is interested in the study of social class, elites, land issues, human rights, conflict/peace, and transitional justice.
He holds a law degree from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (UNAL) an MA in Socio-legal studies from the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL), affiliated to the University of the Basque Country, and an MSc in Inequalities and Social Science from LSE. He currently researches under the Atlantic Equity Grant funded project ‘Peace and Gender (In)equality: Lessons from the Colombian Peace Agreement of 2016’, linked to the Politics of Inequality research theme of the LSE International Inequalities Institute.