Are you looking for a challenging position in a dynamic setting? The
Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies (ARTES) currently has a vacant PhD position as part of the starting grant from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the Netherlands project ‘Legal mobilisation in European law’, led by principal investigators
Dr. Marta Morvillo and
Dr. Stefan Salomon, with the collaboration of
Prof. Luiza Bialasiewicz. ARTES is one of the five Research Schools within the
Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research (AIHR).
You will also form part of the Department of International and European Public Law and the
Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance (ACELG). ACELG has a strong track-record of excellent research and sustains a dynamic research culture through a series of events and initiatives. ACELG participates among other things in the project
SGEL that connects European law with public international law and private law and is home to the ERC Consolidator project ‘Strategic Climate Litigation’s Direct and Indirect Consequences for Democracies’, led by
Prof. Christina Eckes.
What is the project about? Legal mobilisation is on the rise in Europe. Citizens and associations increasingly use law to hold governments and companies accountable for failing to uphold their environmental and fundamental rights commitments. Legal mobilization can be broadly described as a practice of pursuing social, political, or economic change through legal means in judicial or quasi-judicial fora.
While legal mobilisation is a flourishing field of research, important questions still need to be addressed regarding the actors that engage in legal mobilisation, and the socio-economic and political contexts within which such mobilisation occurs. The project will thus query the role that private and public actors assume in legal mobilization, the way in which legal, political, and economic structures shape practices of legal mobilization, as well as questions regarding the broader implications of legal mobilisation on institutions and decision-making processes.
What are you going to do? The PhD project is part of the broader project on legal mobilisation in European law. The objective of the PhD project is to enquire how socio-economic structures on the one hand and legal structures on the other co-constitute each other in practices of legal mobilization in Europe. Within this general topic, we envisage several possible strands of enquiry that the PhD project could focus on: (1) different actors that engage in legal mobilisation, (2) procedural rules that shape practices of legal mobilisation, (3) institutional power shifts as an effect of legal mobilisation.
We welcome research proposals that address either one of these lines of enquiry or several aspects cutting across different lines of enquiry through interdisciplinary methods that are broadly located in the law in context approach. This may include a variety of different methodologies (e.g. political theory, legal anthropology, sociologically informed approaches) and methods (e.g. participants observation, qualitative interviews, quantitative approaches). Legal mobilization could also be investigated from a comparative or a multi-level perspective.
Tasks and responsibilities: - participating in meetings and activities of the project research group;
- submission of a PhD thesis within four years;
- publishing one single-authored, peer reviewed article;
- publishing one peer reviewed article, co-authored with one or more supervisors;
- presenting intermediate research results at workshops and conferences;
- contributing to the organisation of knowledge dissemination activities;
- (Co-)teaching courses at the BA-level in the 2nd and 3rd year of the appointment (max. 0,2FTE per year);
- participating in the Research School and Faculty of Humanities and/or the Amsterdam Law School PhD.