Faculty of Society and Culture

This Faculty will bring together our programmes in arts, design, humanities, social sciences, business and law to create a new Faculty of Society and Culture.

• School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries
• School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Northumbria Law School
• Newcastle Business School
  
  

The Faculty will be home to approximately 10,200 students and 600 staff.

It will consist of our existing School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries and the Northumbria Law School and bring together a number of existing but currently separate departments.  

The current departments of Humanities and Social Sciences will come together as one new School of Humanities and Social Sciences and four extant business departments will come together to form a new, unified, Business School .

 

 

Location

The Faculty’s programmes are delivered in buildings across both sides of the University’s Newcastle City Campus as well as our London campus and via a large number of transnational education partnerships.  

Business, Law and many of our Design programmes are delivered in the stunning buildings on City Campus East which feature extensive studio, workshop and creative spaces; large scale lecture theatres; a mock courtroom and a Bloomberg Trading Suite. Exciting new teaching and research spaces are currently being created for colleagues in Humanities as we redevelop a number of new and existing buildings.

 

Key partnerships

The Faculty of Society and Culture will lead on many of the University’s high-profile external partnerships including those with cultural organisations such as the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art; North East Museums; the British Film Institute, and Live Theatre.  

The University is a leading partner in the bid to deliver a national Centre for Writing in Newcastle. Together with New Writing North and key civic, cultural, business and charity partners, we have submitted a bid for £5 million to the government’s Cultural Development Fund to develop the Centre and expect to hear if the bid has been successful over the coming months.

Through our Corporate Executive Development Centre we work with more than 700 business leaders and managers to provide learning experiences that enable significant and sustainable change.

 

Research, education and knowledge exchange

The Schools within the Faculty of Society and Culture been critical in advancing the University’s strategic ambition of embedding experiential learning into study.  

The Student Law Office and the Business Clinic have provided enormously successful experiential learning opportunities for students for well over a decade. Under academic supervision, students have represented thousands of clients with real legal problems and have provided free consultancy advice to multinationals, SMEs, social enterprises, charities and not-for-profit organisations. Live projects, placements, internships, industry collaborations and exhibitions are integral to our creative programmes, ensuring Northumbria is providing students with valuable networks and career-enhancing opportunities. Experiential learning and working with external partners is also central to our Design programmes and students in all programmes will soon benefit from a similar approach.  

In the last academic year the departments that will make-up the new Faculty of Society and Culture were awarded a total of £4.1 million in research grants and contract income from organisations including Wellcome Trust, Leverhulme Trust, AHRC, British Academy, Royal Society, MRC, the Science Museum and ESRC.

The departments currently hold a number of high-profile research and knowledge exchange awards including:

The £1.5m AHRC Creative Communities programme which is exploring how co-created culture can enhance belonging, address regional inequality and deliver devolution;  

The £3.4 million PROBabLE Futures project which is investigating the future use of probabilistic AI in law enforcement;  

The new Centre for Digital Supply Chain Excellence which aims to create game-changing solutions for businesses operating across a vast range of supply chain dependent sectors;  

And the £2 million IMPACT+ project which brings together a network of academic experts, manufacturers, major fashion brands and consumers to examine how environmental impact across the fashion and textiles industry is measured and assessed.  

Colleagues in the existing departments performed exceptionally well in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework.  

Northumbria is ranked 4th in the UK for research power in UoA 32 (Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory) with the research environment rated 4* and 3* and 94% of impact being recognised as internationally excellent or outstanding.

In UoA 27 (English Language & Literature), the University is ranked 21st for research power and 90% of research outputs were rated as world-leading and internationally excellent. History (UoA 28) is ranked 26th in the UK for research power and Northumbria is in the top ten nationwide for the quality of its research publications in this discipline.

Law (UoA 18) was ranked 7th in the UK for research power, a rise of 37 places compared to the previous REF, while Business & Management Studies is ranked 9th for research power and saw the largest rise in the sector in this measure.

For further information, including details of how to apply, please visit: www.odgers.com/92845