A Master’s degree program in Sociology takes two years to complete (it comprises 120 credits or 3600 academic hours). Within the duration of the program, students study modern methodology for studying social reality, social processes dynamics, social structure and social transformations.
In addition to that, international academic exchanges and scientific partnerships (participation in scientific collaborations) allow students to dive into their professional fields and broaden their horizons. A number of courses are taught in English. A vital requirement for the graduation of students seeking the Master’s degree is a successful public defence of the Master’s thesis.
The program is developed according to the graduates needs in certain competencies. It specifically focuses on the enhancement of the practical skills, which contemporary sociological education highlights, and also ensures the connection between the studies of Master’s students and the scientific work of the Sociology department of NaUKMA. The scientific work of the department is focused on social dynamics and social processes forecasting, as well as the analysis of complex systems. Thereafter, the program is notedly research-oriented. In particular, the research can not only describe and explain existing social structures but also reasonably foretell social dynamics.
The program is characterized by methodological concentration and in-depth teaching of quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods for the needs of scientific research as well as applied and analytical research. Master’s program in the educational field ‘Sociology’ cultivates cumulative training in the methods of collecting and analysing social data starting from the undergraduate level through the Master’s degree and straight to the PhD program level. The Master’s program is aimed at training specialists who could further investigate modern social reality by applying the latest digital methods.
Read moreThe program’s emphasis on quantitative research methods aims to:
Normative (obligatory) and professional-elective disciplines contribute to the formation of integral competence of the second level of education – the ability to carry out scientific research and solve complex problems in the sociological niche, integrating knowledge in the multidisciplinary contexts of social sciences and related fields. Research and innovation activity involves obtaining up-to-date empirical data for the development of new knowledge and analytical procedures, taking into account the principles of social and research ethics and the responsibility it imposes.
The block of selective disciplines is adapted annually in order to satisfy the research interests of young scholars enrolled in that year of study. Selective courses form cumulative tracks that contribute to in-depth specialization and versatile development of students (studies of social inequality, sociology of health, economic sociology, analysis of social networks, public sociology, social psychology, gender studies, urban sociology and poverty studies, organizational studies, sociology of youth, military sociology, sociology of education, cognitive and psychological studies of social phenomena, sociology of culture, etc.). Selective Master's courses are taught by almost the entire staff of the Department of Sociology, providing Master's students with intellectual interaction and potential scientific co-authorship with a team of more than 20 scientists with active research programs and international networks of scientific cooperation. Three permanent professors of the department have PhD degrees obtained in American and Western European universities. These specialists lead both normative and elective modules in the areas of their scientific specialization. Most representatives of the department conduct scientific work and are involved in Ukrainian and/or international scientific teams, foreign educational institutions, research and educational projects. Some scholars of the department manage their own scientific projects and conduct empirical work, which is reflected in their active publishing activities in Ukraine and abroad, in which our program tries to actively involve students in the Master's and PhD programs of the Department of Sociology.
The Master's program ‘Sociology’ offers wide opportunities for scientific international cooperation (academic mobility exchanges at partner universities within the consortium, participation in international conferences, joint research projects with department teachers, etc.). One of the priorities of the program is the preparation of students of the department at the Master's level and above for the requirements of publishing activity in international scientific periodicals and ‘equipping’ them with grant activity and project management skills.
Within the duration of the program, you will:Graduates of the Master's program work in analytical centres, in marketing, and other areas, as they are prepared to perform work aimed at the analytical processing of social information and, accordingly, can be involved in all stages of social research carried out by representatives of analytical centres, sociological companies specializing in marketing research, and teams of other state and non-state organizations conducting social research. Of course, after gaining a Master's degree in Sociology you will be able to continue your studies at the university in the third cycle of higher education at the level of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Sociology and other specialities of the humanitarian and socio-economic direction.
‘I graduated from the Bachelor’s program in Political Science in NaUKMA and when it was time to decide whether I should go for my Master’s or not, I was doubting a lot. My scientific interests were related to urbanism, city politics, local protests and the study of these processes from the perspective of the social sciences. When I was thinking about where to enrol, I realized that there were no Master's programs of this kind in Ukraine, as well as there was no time to prepare documents for studying abroad, so I decided that a good option would be to stay at KMA. I was choosing between Public Relations, Political Science and Sociology, but after talking with my friends, I decided to choose the latter. I remembered a quote by Mychailo Wynnyckyj, who once said on the elective course on political elites: ‘If you don’t have the opportunity to do your Master’s degree abroad, try to enrol for a program in Mohylyanka again but change your major’. Therefore, I decided that Sociology is a good option for me. During two years of study, it was proven that I wasn’t mistaken. Here I was able to develop a topic that interested me since many teachers allowed me to work with my own academic interests and consider them through the prism of one course or another. For example, you are given a general direction – social classes, and you take your topic (for me, it was class stratification in cities) and fit it into the given one. The curriculum does not limit you and is flexible enough to adapt to your interests.’
‘I graduated from the Bachelor’s program in Sociology in NaUKMA and then enrolled in a Master’s program. I liked that during my Master's studies, most seminars were based on a discussion in which almost all students are involved. It is very important and valuable that the professorsgive us a lot of space to decide what each of us is interested in and which particular topics fit our scientific interests more and allow us to work with them. In my opinion, the Master's program contains a lot of original content, new topics and familiar teachers from the Bachelor's program take on new roles. All of this adds dynamics to learning. Also, I believe that a Master's degree is not a mere repetition of a Bachelor's program, as it is sometimes said. There are many interesting courses in the Master's program, for example, Mychailo Wynnyckyj course, which was truly an intellectual adventure.’
«While getting my Bachelor's degree in informatics and computer engineering, I was also engaged in student activism. I didn't plan to enrol in a Master's degree, so I got a job as a project manager in IT. I aimed to move forward and work as a product manager. That required not only to manage a team but also to study a developed product and undertake research. A friend of mine recommended sociology at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Thus, I passed the exams and enrolled. Studying in this program was gripping. I was able to fulfil my research interests here. I enjoyed the organization of the educational process at the department. You could feel that the lecturers treated students as people who came for knowledge, and they helped us to get it. I'm very happy that I attended both quantitative and qualitative sociology methods courses. Among proposed classes, there were in-depth ones, such as queer studies. Honestly, I didn't expect that from academic education because the program was high-quality, relevant, and modern. What's more, I found myself interested in qualitative methods, and I work with them now. In general, I gained much knowledge during my Master's degree. I look back on most of the courses with pleasure.’
‘My journey to sociology was rather long. After achieving a Bachelor's degree in engineering at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, I realized that it's not what I want to do in the future. I have already been interested in sociology while studying engineering. I read scientific articles, including ones by lecturers from the sociology department. So I decided to move in this direction because it was what interested me. I attended many fascinating courses during the sociology Master's program. They produced a better understanding of things that are objects of my interest sphere. It is essential to me that I had a chance to follow both methodology and really cool worldview courses. Additionally, I didn't feel any discomfort as a person without a sociology background. Everything comes from the classes that gave me an understanding of sociological bases.’
‘By the end of the master's program first year, we had the opportunity to choose where to undertake the internship. I chose the Ukrainian-Swiss project 'Medical education development'. It seemed like a great opportunity to apply my knowledge in a practical field in an organization that is changing the Ukrainian healthcare system for the better. During the practice, I filled the repository and educational online platform, worked with various medical materials, visualized quantitative data and project research results.This year I graduated and still work as a consultant in the Ukrainian-Swiss project for a year now. After the internship, I got interested in the project's activities and wanted to continue my professional development in this field. The project gave me an excellent opportunity for this. Currently, I work with various areas, starting from planning and conducting sociological research and ending with the organization of educational events. Studying sociology for 6 years gave me a lot of practical skills, shaped me as a person, and strongly influenced my worldview. I won't be able to remove my 'sociological glasses' anymore in my professional and personal life. But it works for me well.’
The main objectives of the course are to strengthen the general sociological culture of students and to widen their worldview by providing knowledge about the main theoretical and methodological foundations of modelling and predicting social processes; to master skills in using simple methods and models for predicting social processes; to provide knowledge of approaches to the development of mathematical models of social processes that are sufficient to assign the task and work together with mathematicians on complex models; to teach the nuances of using one of the most promising modelling methods — agent-based modelling.
The course aims are to give a general perception of the sampling method in social sciences and teach the nuances of forming a sample for conducting the most common types of sociological research. The program describes the concepts of mathematical statistics (normal distribution, representativeness, etc.) and types of samples. Additionally, it shows methods of calculating the sampling error for simple random samples (SRS), besides the design effect for calculating the error for stratified, cluster, and multistage samples (including probability proportional to size sampling - PPS). Moreover, the course highlights organizational issues of sampling.
The purpose of the course is to impart knowledge and skills in the basic principles of conducting research within the qualitative research paradigm and the peculiarities of both modern domestic and foreign research usage. Particular emphasis is placed on the main approaches to the theorizing results of the conducted scientific investigations and their comparative and critical presentation to the scientific community.
The course is a Master's methodological seminar that introduces research technologies in social sciences to students. The program provides students with an in-depth understanding and knowledge of empirical scientific research planning and conducting. We will consider quantitative and qualitative approaches to data collecting and analysis. Besides, we will highlight the ethical dimension of executing a scientific project. Students will start to create their own research ‘libraries’ from the methods' literature. Seminar participants will work on a project during the semester and present its results in a scientific publication format at the end of the course.
The main objective of the course is to teach students the basics of working in the R programming environment, which is the leader in statistical data analysis nowadays. This course is a logical extension of data analysis in the SPSS Statistics program. The course focused on the data capabilities comparison of the above program packages. Special attention pays to the principles and techniques of data visualization and the statistical analysis result presentation.
Class inequality and social stratification have been in the spotlight of social thinkers and researchers for more than a century. The concept of ‘class’ is common and deeply controversial at the same time. Alternative theoretical and methodological concepts of classes will be analysed along with the class social structure. Additionally, the course covers the following topics: modern neo-Marxist and neoWeberian theoretical justification approaches, the results of the class structure empirical studies, and the main social stratification of society system conceptualizations.
That is a practical course focused on training Master's students who are preparing to carry out the qualifying research. The aim is to give a better understanding of the research process mechanism and explain the nuances of carrying it out to get the best result. The studying process covers the cycle of research work, from writing a proposal and formulating the variables involved in the hypothesis to starting the data collecting, working with respondents, and publishing the results. We will examine the following issues: research ethics, research plan development, note-taking, and data management. Students will acquire the skills that help to develop effective interview questions, find key informants, and combine the results of quantitative and qualitative forms of data collection. Moreover, students will learn practices for pre-checking the validity and reliability of data obtained through quantitative and qualitative methods.
This course focuses on acquaintance with fundamental texts that theorize sexuality within a queer and decoloniality studies framework. Specifically, we will thoroughly analyse the texts of Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Fatima El-Tayeb, Adi Kunstman, Mariia Mayerchyk, Paul Preciado, Jasbir Puar, Dean Spade, Kim TolBert, Michel Foucault. We will conduct a critical analysis of homonationalism, pinkwashing, pharmacopornography, biopolitics, necropolitics, recuperative policies, etc. concepts based on these texts. Instead, we will seek a way out in the non-normative modus of knowledge (knowledge from below), queer-feminist resistance practices, and the decolonial turn. Moreover, we will consider questions of sexuality, sex, gender, identity, Western/Eurocentrism (in knowledge), colonialism, race, citizenship, and neoliberalism. The course will help to create an understanding of queer epistemologies specifics, differences between modern and postmodern knowledge, essentialism and constructionism, assimilative and transformative strategies. You will be able to distinguish between constructedness and fabrication, coloniality and colonialism at the end of the course. You will understand the connection between sexuality, race, citizenship, gender, and coloniality. Besides, you will be able to methodologically interpret the statement ‘we didn't always have sexuality’.
The course content reveals the main theoretical foundations and empirical research results on the correlation between social inequality, corruption, and trust in society. This course aims to acquaint with the content of conceptual provisions; methods and results of empirical studies of corruption causes and effects; the interdependence between corruption, social inequality, in particular economic, educational, gender, public trust, the institutional structure of society, and the effectiveness of governance in developed Western, non-Western and post-Soviet societies.
The course objectives and aims are to expand students' understanding of the cognitive perspective of sociology and the features of the sociological approach to cognitive phenomena analysis. Cognitive sociology is regarded as a ‘sociology of thinking’. Attention pays to the analysis from a sociological-cognitive perspective of phenomena and processes of perception, focusing attention, classification, ordering, context, labelling, establishing frameworks, ‘mapping’ (location in time and space), relationships of kinship and/or connection, types of identifications, varieties and types of thinking, etc. Theoretical concepts, sociological and sociocultural issues are systematized. Particular attention is paid to deepening the habit of analytical and critical thinking and the application of theoretical concepts to the analysis of current social phenomena and problems.
Although often undifferentiated, post‐Soviet societies demonstrate a variety of transformation trajectories and diverse approaches to identity and memory politics. This course draws on cases from Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, the Baltic States, the Caucasus, Russia, and Kazakhstan to explore the sociocultural transformation of post‐Soviet countries in comparative perspective. We will analyze the construction of new identities and related issues, including language politics and collective memory and mythscapes as well as their media discourses. The roles of museums, media, and different commemoration practices in public spaces are discussed. We will also examine political and civic participation in reforms, including citizens’ value orientations and attitudes towards human rights and the rule of law.
Candidate of sciences, Doctor of Philosophy, Associate professor, PhD in anthropology (University of Connecticut, USA)
building 6, room 213
