Are you passionate about the topic of climate change and sustainability from a sociological perspective? Do you like to traverse and embed yourself in cultural worlds different from your own? Are you interested in ethnographic research and able to create your own independent research track in a larger research project? Then this position may be yours.
The
Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam is currently looking for a PhD candidate in the project “Contested Epistemologies of Sustainability”, led by Dr Catherine Wong and Dr Jaron Harambam. In this project, we examine how climate change and the foundational ways of knowing are contested in two radically different contexts: indigenous communities in South/Southeast Asia and conspiratorial communities in Europe. Both communities challenge hegemonic “Western” epistemologies of sustainability, albeit in their own specific ways. Your project will explore and compare both communities under this broad umbrella of contested epistemologies, but with plenty of room for your own ideas and innovation in who and what you would like to study. Here your creativity comes in and we like to foster that from the start. The overall goal of this project is twofold: to understand the resistance towards hegemonic climate change and sustainability discourses,
and to learn from different epistemological and cultural standpoints that oppose them.
The project is hosted by the research group
Cultural Sociology and more information on the project itself can be found
here.What are you going to do? For this four-year long fully funded position, you will perform a number of different tasks:
- design your own PhD research project within the theme of contested epistemologies of sustainability;
- conduct qualitative research / ethnographic fieldwork in indigenous communities in South/Southeast Asia and in conspiratorial communities in Europe;
- write academic articles with the two P.I.’s and independently;
- present your work to academic, professional and lay audiences;
- teach in our undergraduate (Bachelor) Sociology program (max. 10% of your time);
- assist with administrative and organizational tasks within the project;
- actively participate in the academic communities of the Program Group (Cultural Sociology), department (Sociology) and research school (AISSR).