Job Description

It will be your primary tasks to explore how trust is created for digital technologies in (home) care settings. We are especially interested in how different values and valuations among caregivers, older people, technology provides, etc. constitute trust or distrust in practices of caring. To this end, you will be collaborating with a network of care organisations in the region of Zuid-Limburg using ethnographic methods, co-creation, and participatory action research. You will also have the opportunity to experiment with different designs for knowledge dissemination workshops, where we explicitly look for innovative forms of multimodal scholarly output. The project has received funding from the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports for 2 years.

Your role in the project:

• participate in a collaborative, transdisciplinary research project at the intersection of ageing and technology;
• design and conduct ethnographic research and publish results in high-ranking academic journals;
• experiment with new forms of knowledge valorisation and multimodal scholarly output in the collaboration with care organisations.

Your qualifications

• a PhD in Science and Technology Studies or a related discipline in the social sciences or humanities;
• an affinity with the social and cultural aspects of digital technologies related to care and ageing;
• expertise and skills in qualitative, empirical research, in particular ethnographic methods;
• excellent written and oral communication skills in English and Dutch (at least C1 level in reading, speaking, listening and writing);
• enthusiasm for experimenting with innovative forms of knowledge valorisation;
• the ability to work in a self-propelled manner in transdisciplinary teams and communicate effectively with partners inside and outside of academia.

Fixed-term contract: for 2 years.

You will be offered a temporary position of 2 years (0.8-1.0 FTE). Depending on your experience, we offer a gross salary between € 4.332 and € 4.929 (according to scale 11 of the Collective Labour Agreement Dutch Universities) per month for a full-time employment. Salaries are supplemented with a holiday bonus of 8% and a year-end bonus of 8.3% per year.

Starting date: 1 April 2024

Open Universiteit

The Open Universiteit is the part-time university in the Netherlands. Students follow personalised and activating academic distance education and disciplinary research is carried out within the various fields of science. Students can complete bachelor and master programmes, but also shorter programmes. The characteristics of education are openness, flexibility and quality (see www.ou.nl/rankings). The Open Universiteit has over 17,000 students and more than 750 employees. The OU has branches in the Netherlands and Belgium. The main office is located in Heerlen.

Further information on the Faculty of Humanities is available on our website: https://www.ou.nl/en/faculty-of-humanities.

The Faculty of Humanities

The Faculty of Humanities at Open Universiteit is at the centre of society and attaches importance to ensuring that the research done at the faculty is in line with current issues in society and connected to its social context, thus contributing to the public debate. From the cultural and social sciences, we can help gain insight into the relevance of social changes for individuals and communities and their meaning of these changes. In this way, we want to give direction to the analysis of modern problems and dilemmas. One of the faculty’s key research areas is “Digital Culture, Innovation and Communication” that investigates technological change and innovation - particularly digitalisation and the increasing importance of digitally mediated communication – from a multidisciplinary perspective, combining theories and methods from Science and Technology Studies (STS), Media Studies, and Communication Studies.