Are you curious about relations between love and midlife? Are you interested in exploring the pressing challenges of late modernity, including work pressures, parenting expectations, multiple care responsibilities, fear of commitment, and fear of missing out? Do you have affinity, interest, or experience with (multimodal and/or sensory) ethnographic research on love and intimacy? Are you familiar with or curious about anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, and critical love studies? And importantly, do you enjoy working in a team of spirited researchers?
The Department of Anthropology is currently seeking two PhD candidates for the project ‘Rhythms of Love: Enduring Romantic Relationships at Midlife in Western Europe’ led by
Dr Rahil Roodsaz. This project is funded by a Dutch NWO-Vidi Grant.
The Department of Anthropology is one of the departments at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FMG). The PhD track is part of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), and these two positions are embedded in the programme
group Exploring Diversity: Critical Ethnographies of Belonging and Exclusion.
What are you going to do? Rhythms of Love is an ethnographic study of enduring love at midlife in Western Europe. It will investigate how people maintain long-term romantic relationships while going through life transitions in midlife (age 35–60). It aims to theorise the complex temporalities of enduring love, enabling us to reconfigure assumptions of a good life. Practicing enduring love at midlife means negotiating contemporary societal challenges: work pressures, parenting expectations, multiple care responsibilities, fear of commitment, and fear of missing out. How do middle-aged people succeed in maintaining an enduring love, especially when society values individualism, speed, and youthfulness? Can the temporal qualities of enduring love help us to imagine the good life differently? This project will develop the conceptual framework of ‘rhythms of love’ to analyse the temporal qualities and possibilities of enduring midlife love, focusing on three intersecting domains: partnership, parenthood, and other significant relationships. By centring gender, socioeconomic, racial, and religious diversity, the project rejects enduring love at midlife as a unitary category, and instead will theorise different conceptions of the good life underlying various people’s experiences of temporality.
The research team, consisting of two PhD candidates, a professional photographer, and the Principal Investigator, will conduct ethnographic research in Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, employing multiple methods: ‘go-along’ informal conversations, love-life histories, emotion diaries, and photographic essays, but the team is open to experimentation with multiple (sensory) modalities. In a final sub-project, the PI will synthesise the team’s insights to advance theories of late-modern transformations of intimacy.
Your tasks - Your main task as PhD candidate will be to develop your own PhD within the framework of the overall project;
- next to working on and managing your own research, you will contribute to collaborative aspects of the project. This will include collecting data for jointly written publication(s) and lending respective expertise to team members;
- you are expected to conduct 12-months ethnographic fieldwork in Sweden or Germany;
- you are expected to live in the Amsterdam area and take active part in team meetings and the research environment at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR);
- teaching (up to 10% of your time) and organisational support for the project leader will be part of your job responsibilities. These tasks will allow you to gain valuable professional experience next to working towards your PhD.