Sociology and Spanish

Sociology and Spanish is a pairing that brings together a discipline for understanding social structures and change with a language that opens one of the most diverse and geographically extensive linguistic and cultural communities in the world. Sociology provides conceptual tools for analysing inequality, power, culture, and social organisation in any society. Spanish, spoken by over five hundred million people across Spain, Latin America, and parts of the United States, provides direct access to societies that illustrate many of the most important themes in sociology, including migration and diaspora, postcolonialism, inequality, urbanisation, and social movements.

Together, the two subjects develop graduates who are both analytically rigorous and culturally fluent in a globally significant context.

At the University of Manchester, this four-year programme develops your sociological thinking and your Spanish language proficiency in parallel throughout the degree. You will engage with the major traditions of sociological theory and with a wide range of empirical topics, from globalisation and digital society to race, gender, and political economy. In Spanish, you will develop your language skills to an advanced level while also engaging with Hispanic literature, history, and culture, reading in the original language and situating texts within their social and historical contexts.

Manchester has outstanding departments in both sociology and Spanish, and the programme benefits from the expertise of both.

This full-time, four-year programme includes a sandwich year with a work placement and a year abroad, providing an exceptionally comprehensive range of professional and international experiences. The year abroad, in a Spanish-speaking country or environment, is transformative for your language development and your understanding of Hispanic societies. Graduates go on to careers in international organisations, journalism, the civil service, development, research, education, business, and many other fields where sociological understanding and Spanish language ability together constitute a genuinely distinctive qualification.