The
department of Interdisciplinary Social Science has a job opening for a PhD candidate interested in country ownership perceptions of immigrant-origin minorities in the Netherlands and USA.
Your job Statements as ‘this country is also ours’ are increasingly used by immigrant-origin minorities to claim ownership of a country. The belief that the country is ‘also ours’ appeals to the notion that, therefore, ‘we’, in this case immigrant-origin minorities, are entitled to claim certain rights but also required to assume responsibilities. This perceived ownership could have a dual nature, contributing to outcomes that undermine harmonious intergroup relations, such as exclusionary attitudes toward newcomers and far-right voting, while also fostering cohesion-enhancing results like civic engagement and a heightened sense of collective responsibility. Hence, immigrant-origin minorities’ perceptions of country ownership can have both a dark and a bright side. While previous research on ownership perceptions has primarily focused on ethnic majority populations, the current project takes a novel approach by examining the perspectives of immigrant-origin minorities.
This project introduces perceived country ownership as a novel and potentially relevant explanation of immigrant-origin minorities’ civic participation and negative intergroup attitudes, with the expectation that ownership matters over and above the existing explanations of civic participation and intergroup attitudes. Multiple immigrant-origin minorities will be considered as well as migration generations in the context of the Netherlands, which is a relatively recent immigration country, and in the USA, a country that was built on immigration. Such a comparative design offers insights into the extent to which the processes are similar across groups and in two different national contexts.
A multifaceted methodology will be employed, including cross-sectional and longitudinal survey data, and survey-embedded experiments. We have secured access to high-quality, nation-wide datasets to examine how country ownership is perceived, whether these perceptions are conducive to higher civic involvement (the bright side) as well as stronger anti-immigration sentiments and far-right voting (the dark side), and what role perceived rights and perceived responsibilities play in these processes among immigrant-origin minorities. There are also funds available to conduct several additional experimental studies.
As a PhD candidate, your work involves conducting research resulting in international scientific publications, and presenting at international conferences. You will also participate in methodological training and gain experience with teaching at Bachelor’s and Master’s level. The successful candidate will be based at the department of Interdisciplinary Social Science, with co-supervision from the department of Sociology, and will become member of the European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations (ERCOMER). ERCOMER has a strong track record in research on interethnic relations with a particular focus on international migration, group identities, and cultural diversity. In addition, the candidate will be embedded in the Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS) Graduate School.