Masters applications for 2023 entry are now closed.
Applications for September 2024 will open on Monday 25 September. Applications are now open for programmes with a January 2024 start. View our programmes »
Overview
- Explore energy utilisation, the transition to sustainable energy sources and the impact of infrastructures on the environment through the unique lenses of the humanities and social sciences.
- Focus on real world cases illustrating environmental and energy challenges, using the Middle East and its neighbouring regions to explore global issues.
- Tailor your studies to your interests and career aspirations with a wide range of optional modules across disciplines, including optional internship modules in relevant sectors.
- Equip yourself with the knowledge and skills for diverse career paths in policy, energy, environment or further academic research.
- Choose a traditional dissertation or hone your skills in a specific area with an alternative capstone project.
1st for Middle Eastern and African Studies
Top 10 in the UK for Politics
Top 100 in the world for Politics
Largest purpose-built Middle East centre in the UK
Entry requirements
We will consider applicants with a 2:2 Honours degree with 53% or above in a social sciences or humanities discipline. While we normally only consider applicants who meet these criteria, if you are coming from a different academic background which is equivalent to degree level, or have relevant work experience, we would welcome your application.
Entry requirements for international students
English language requirements
International students need to show they have the required level of English language to study this course. The required test scores for this course fall under Profile B2. Please visit our English language requirements page to view the required test scores and equivalencies from your country.
Course content
MA Politics of Energy, Infrastructure and Environment offers a multidisciplinary exploration of energy use, the transition to sustainable sources, and the environmental impacts of infrastructure and energy. Integrating perspectives from the humanities and social sciences, the course examines these critical issues with a particular focus on the Middle East, a region with paradigmatic struggles around environmental preservation and fossil fuel use.
Customise your Masters to suit your interests with a variety of optional modules, and choose between a traditional dissertation or a capstone project. The capstone project allows you to explore an area of interest through mediums such as curating an exhibition, engaging in artistic production like filmmaking, composing substantial grant proposals for NGOs, or drafting major policy reports.
You will graduate well-prepared for careers in policy, energy, environment, or further academic research, equipped with the knowledge and skills to actively contribute to the development of a sustainable society and economy in the 21st century.
The modules we outline here provide examples of what you can expect to learn on this degree course based on recent academic teaching. The precise modules available to you in future years may vary depending on staff availability and research interests, new topics of study, timetabling and student demand.
120 credits of compulsory modules, 60 credits of optional modules.
Please note:
(1) Many of the Departments below are reviewing their curricula, and some of the modules listed below may be subsumed by other modules.
(2) Because of the above, as well as because of some other departments’ modules are offered in some years and not in others, the list below is provisional.
(3) Students must Choose either the ARAM027 Dissertation or ARAM092 Capstone module in term 3.
(4) Students most not pick more than 30 credits from modules lower than level 7 (PGT).
Compulsory modules
| Code | Module |
Credits |
|---|
| ARAM090 |
Politics of Energy and Infrastructure | 30 |
| ARAM091 |
The Political and Social Life of the Environment | 30 |
| ARAM027 |
MA Dissertation | 60 |
| ARAM092 |
Practicum/Capstone Project | 60 |
Optional modules
| Code | Module |
Credits |
|---|
| ANT3092 |
Animal Minds and Animal Ethics | 15 |
| ANT3093 |
Climate Change in Global and Local Perspectives | 15 |
| ANT3097 |
Environment and Society | 15 |
| ARAM147 |
The Kurds: History and Politics | 30 |
| ARAM233 |
Dissertation skills | 15 |
| ARAM235 |
Contemporary History and Politics of the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula | 30 |
| BIOM568 |
Blue Planet | 15 |
| DRA3105 |
Theatre for Environmental Change | 30 |
| EAS3194 |
Resource Fictions: Oil, Water and Conflict in the World-System | 30 |
| GEOM141 |
Global Challenges | 15 |
| POL3250 |
Environmental Policy in Times of Crisis | 15 |
| SML3041 |
Green Matters in Modern Languages and Cultures | 15 |
| SOC3137 |
Climate Change in Global and Local Perspectives | 15 |
| SPA3014 |
Environments in the Public Sphere | 15 |
| ANT3094 |
When Things Fall Apart: Social Infrastructures | 15 |
| ARAM054 |
State and Society in the Middle East | 30 |
| ARAM221 |
The Palestine Question: Past and Present | 30 |
| ARAM236 |
Sociology and Anthropology of the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula | 15 |
| BEM3056 |
Business and Climate Change | 15 |
| EAF3519 |
Cinema in the Anthropocene | 30 |
| GEO3225 |
Climate Change and its Impacts | 15 |
| GEOM149 |
Green Planet | 15 |
| POLM222M |
The Politics, Policy and Practice of Sustainable Development | 30 |
| SOCM044 |
Food and Sustainability: Economy, Society and Environment | 15 |
| THEM305 |
Ecological Interpretation of the Bible | 15 |
| ARAM093 |
Energy, Infrastructure and Environment Work Experience | 15 |
Fees
2025/26 entry
UK fees per year:
£12,500 full-time; £6,250 part-time
International fees per year:
£25,300 full-time; £12,650 part-time
Scholarships
We invest heavily in scholarships for talented prospective Masters students. This includes over £5 million in scholarships for international students, such as our Global Excellence Scholarships*.
For more information on scholarships, please visit our scholarships and bursaries page.
*Selected programmes only. Please see the Terms and Conditions for each scheme for further details.
Teaching and research
Teaching
The MA has a core module that runs all year and will be taught through a mix of lectures and seminars. The lectures will touch on the major political and social debates, histories, and contexts of the most urgent issues pertaining to energy, infrastructures and environmental degradation. The thematic arrangement (for example around desertification, energy transitions, green capitalism etc) allows for critical analysis of a range of important topics. Optional modules will similarly offer a mix of lectures and seminars. An optional internship module will allow students to work on career development.
Research
The core module and the capstone project or dissertation will all require research on subjects of significance to the student. Tutors will help guide you towards subjects on which they themselves have extensive expertise, and their own research will intimately inform the subjects they will teach.
Assessments
There are diverse assessments on the course to develop and evaluate your knowledge and skills. Assessments are specific to each module and may include tasks like essays, book reviews, reports and presentations. Additionally, you will choose between either a traditional dissertation or a capstone project in your final term. These varied assessments ensure you can critically analyse key issues, communicate effectively and apply your learning to real-world challenges, preparing you for success upon graduation.
Professor Laleh Khalili
Al Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies
Dr Katie Natanel
Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies
Dr Allan Hassaniyan
Lecturer in Middle East Politics
Professor Laleh Khalili
Al Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies
Laleh Khalili made her way to a PhD in politics by way of an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at the University of Texas and after working for some years as a management consultant in the US. She is compelled by and curious about the workings of transnational movements: of colonial forms of power and violence, of resistance, of ideas and practices, of people, and of hydrocarbons, capital, and cargo.
She has examined the representations and practices of violence in her first two books, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: the Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge 2007) and Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgency (Stanford 2013) as well as in a volume I co-edited with Jillian Schwedler, titled Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion (Hurst 2010). Her most recent books, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso 2020) and The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (Mack Books 2024) examine the role of maritime infrastructures as conduits of movement of technologies, capital, people and cargo. She is currently completing a book of essays on Extractive Capitalism (Profile, forthcoming 2025), and planning another major project, on the afterlives of oil and hydrocarbons, after their nationalisation in the Middle East.
Profile page
Dr Katie Natanel
Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies
Dr Natanel is interested in micro-politics, or the politics of everyday life, and psycho-social dynamics of life in the Middle East and beyond. These themes are reflected in her first book project, Sustaining Conflict: Apathy and Domination in Israel-Palestine (2016, University of California Press), which was awarded the 2017 Feminist and Women's Studies Association (UK & Ireland) Book Prize.
Since 2017, she has worked closely with students and comrades to challenge what ‘counts’ as knowledge, insisting on the significance of aesthetic and embodied expression – as ways of knowing that reach and move people. Examples of our praxis can be seen in her most recent publications ‘Toward a Liberation Pedagogy’ (in Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research, special issue on 'Anticolonial Feminist Imaginaries') and ‘Steps toward a decolonial feminist ecology’ (forthcoming in Creative Ruptions for Emergent Educational Futures, Palgrave Macmillan).
Her work on pedagogies is part of a larger shift to focusing on decolonisation – as a material practice and knowledge project oriented toward justice, liberation and self-determination. She is currently developing a research project on decolonial feminist ecologies, which is grounded in local land-based initiatives. As of autumn 2023, she also has worked with Radical Ecology as the coordinator of the Black Atlantic Innovation Network (BAIN). In spring 2024 the network will launch ‘A Framework for Environmental Justice’, developed with the UCL Sarah Parker Redmond Centre and other Network partners.
Profile page
Dr Allan Hassaniyan
Lecturer in Middle East Politics
Dr Hassaniyan is the author of Kurdish Politics in Iran, Crossborder Interactions and Mobilisation since 1947 published by Cambridge University Press. The book focuses on the evolution of the Kurdish national movement in Iran in its relation to the Iranian state and its relation to the Kurdish movement in Iraq since the second half of the 20th century until 2017.
His forthcoming book (project) is an investigation of Iran’s environmental and ecological challenges, inspired mainly by the civil society organisations. What distinguishes this project is the move away from the traditional focus on the state and the centre, to the environmental movement and ecological struggle of non-Persian people and communities (i.e. the Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis) in Iran. This movement is conceptualised as the environmentalism of the subaltern, and it produced counterhegemonic discourses to the Iranian state’s discourse of ‘security’, ‘identity’ and ‘development’.
Profile page
Careers
Employer valued skills
The MA Politics of Energy and Infrastructure course will equip you with a versatile and highly sought-after skill set, preparing you for an impactful career. As a graduate, you will possess a deep understanding of critical issues surrounding energy, infrastructure and the environment.
Career paths
After graduation, you’ll be well-prepared to step into policy, community and corporate ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) jobs, drawing on a deep understanding of global energy and environmental issues. Your exposure to critical and political approaches to energy security, infrastructure development and environmental concerns will also mean you have a valuable skill set ideal for advancing to doctoral programmes in this rapidly expanding field of study.
Career support
As a University of Exeter student, you will also have access to the Career Zone, providing invaluable support and tailored guidance to help you prepare for your career after university.
