Applicants are invited to apply for a PhD position within the project 'Inclusive Cities through Equitable access to Urban Mobility Infrastructures for India and Bangladesh'. The project is funded by NWO-WOTRO Science for Global Development, awarded to the principal investigator, Dr Ajay Bailey and consortium members from India and Bangladesh.

The project
Cities in the global South are rapidly growing in size, but many marginalised and vulnerable residents (such as lower-income households, senior citizens, women and disabled people) do not have affordable, safe and accessible public transport, which reduces their chances for decent work, healthcare and a social life. Transport planning largely ignores access inequalities but prioritises efficiency and economic benefits. This project will go beyond traditional engineering approaches by taking a novel, user-centred intersectional approach that recognises how multiple forms of social stratification intersect to produce urban mobility inequalities for marginalised groups.

The central objective is to develop evidence based insights for affordable, safe and accessible urban mobility. More specifically, we aim to: 

1. explore how physical and social barriers to urban transport are widened by the existing systems and the social and economic implications of such barriers (SDG-11&9);
2. develop and contextualise measures to improve access to work (SDG-8), healthcare (SDG-3) and social life (SDG-10) through improvements in the public transport system, and
3. co-design an inclusive urban mobility evaluative framework that can provide guidelines for inclusive cities.

We will apply an innovative multi-sited mixed-method approach combining visual surveys, GPS-led-geo-narratives and multi-stakeholder hackathons. Inequalities of urban mobility will be studied in Delhi, Bengaluru and Dhaka, as these cities are experiencing major infrastructural changes and have populations with multiple access disparities. Inclusive cities with affordable, safe and accessible low carbon public transport lead to a reduction of emissions and show improvement in public health and wellbeing. 

This PhD project involves developing qualitative methodological tools and conducting qualitative fieldwork in Dhaka, as well as the analysis of these data. The PhD researcher is expected to collaborate closely with qualitative and quantitative researchers in the other sub projects. It is an exciting opportunity to join an interdisciplinary research team working on innovative approaches to make cities and urban mobility infrastructures more inclusive in India and Bangladesh. 

The PhD researcher will: 

• develop qualitative methods, together with other researchers, and liaise with non-governmental organisations, community groups and public transport companies with whom research will be conducted;
• carry out data collection through go-along interviews, focus-groups and observations among transport users and non-users;
• analyse qualitative  data and collaborate with researchers to analyse the GIS based data;
• take a leading role in the conceptual and methodological innovations required by the project, in collaboration with the other researchers in the team;
• write and co-author academic publications together with other members of the team (minimum of one paper per year as lead author).

We are looking for a candidate who has:

• a Master's in Anthropology, Demography, Sociology, International Development Studies, Urban Planning, Geography, Public Health, Community Medicine, or a related field;
• experience with conducting qualitative interviews and ethnographic field work in developing countries, and preferably in Bangladesh;
• experience of working in multi-disciplinary and multicultural research teams;
• experience with organizing workshops and stakeholder meetings;
• an excellent written and spoken command of English, as demonstrated by an excellent Master's thesis, publications in English language journals (desirable) and presentations at national/international conferences;
• knowledge of Bangla is essential;
• a willingness to contribute proactively to the development of the project;
• good organizational skills.

We offer a position (1.0 FTE) for the duration of four years, of which he first year will be a probationary period and, after a positive assessment, the position will be extended for the remaining 36 months. The gross monthly salary ranges between €2,325 in the first year and €2,972 in the fourth year of employment (scale P according to the Collective Labour Agreement Dutch Universities). Salaries are supplemented with a holiday bonus of 8% and a year-end bonus of 8.3% per year. In addition, Utrecht University offers excellent secondary conditions, including an attractive retirement scheme, (partly paid) parental leave and flexible employment conditions (multiple choice model). More information about working at Utrecht University can be found here.

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