Childhood & Youth and Creative Writing BA

CHILDHOOD & YOUTH

Childhood & Youth is an engaging, multidisciplinary field. You will explore various issues and challenges children and young people face today, both in the UK and around the world. This degree draws on sociology, politics, history, social policy, and cultural studies. It examines key questions about children, young people, and their social contexts.

Topics include:  

- How children's roles in society have changed

- Children's rights and the UNCRC

- How social class, poverty, gender, ethnicity, and disability shape their lives

You will also study the role of risk in children's everyday experiences and how they shape their social worlds. You will also learn research methods. These methods help children and young people face their challenges.

With a strong focus on social justice and welfare, this degree will help you grow as a critical social scientist. You will value your role in the academic community at Hope. As graduates, you will apply your skills and knowledge to benefit your local community and society at large.

CREATIVE WRITING

Liverpool is a city of poets and storytellers so the perfect location to study creative writing. Merseyside has a distinctive literary culture and at Liverpool Hope you are taught by writers, poets and academics with strong connections to the local writing community and international recognition for their work.

Creative Writing at Liverpool Hope will give you the chance to experience the joys of crafting the written word. The degree focuses on developing you as a writer of poetry and prose (fiction and creative nonfiction), across the broad field of literature (poems, short stories, novels, reflective and critical essays). Professional writing - reviews, blogs and articles for different kinds of media, including how to operate in today’s marketplaces - is also studied. Our focus on creativity and employability means you will be able to produce engaging, innovative and marketable texts.

By studying Creative Writing, you will be empowered with an enhanced command of your craft, increased confidence in expressing your thoughts and emotions, an understanding of the values that inform your writing practice, and the technical skillset to deliver your work to various audiences. Your writing will be enhanced by studying under leading published writers and academics, and you will develop a range of workplace skills to prepare for fulfilling careers.

The degree will often challenge you and ask you to reach beyond your own experience and interests into those of contemporary and historical communities. Using these as creative stimuli, you will be required to reflect upon social contexts, power, and how truth and justice can be communicated or miscommunicated through creative writing. By the end of the degree, you should have a wide appreciation of forms, genres and applications. Included in the degree are field trips which provide material for writing exercises as well as widening your student experience.

Lecturers are all practising writers, poets and academics and will include you in their working lives as writers whether this is book launches, public readings and festivals or writing workshops in the community. You will have the opportunity to read your work at open mics on campus and in the city, present at city cultural events or publish in the two literary magazines run by Liverpool Hope students and postgraduates.

Hear from one of our Creative Writing students.