Novel environmental policies and targets aimed at peatland conservation and restoration, extant turbary rights, and high prices of other fuels

My topic is of both historic and contemporary significance and is particularly salient given the current context of novel environmental policies and targets aimed at peatland conservation and restoration, extant turbary rights, and high prices of other fuels. It is this topic that I hope to investigate in the course's dissertation, with possible scope to broaden the project into a larger study at DPhil.

I plan to conduct interviews and photograph analysis in the Republic of Ireland during the MSc, expanding this to a comparative study with Northern Ireland and incorporating additional methods of policy and demographic data analysis at DPhil, to illuminate nuances related to social-cultural, political, and economic factors.

My proposed research could arguably fall under multiple courses; however, my interest is not simply on the land use, but rather on the dynamic relations between people, culture, and institutions, and the example course offering on the Sociology MSc provides options of clear relevance to me - including Sociology of Gender, Political Sociology, and Social Stratification.