We are seeking a highly motivated and talented PhD candidate to join our research team. The successful candidate will work on an interdisciplinary project that combines state-of-the-art insights from social psychology and democratic theory to investigate how shared values and collective identities are constructed and navigated in community gardens.
Your job While community gardens have great potential in the transition to a just and sustainable agri-food system, they tend to appeal to a particularly homogenous group, often highly educated individuals with strong environmental values. They tend to exclude other social groups who, for example, prioritise food security over environmental sustainability. Furthermore, within community gardens value tensions can arise in a desire to be inclusive while retaining a core identity. This interdisciplinary PhD research project therefore aims to explore the relation between individual values and the construction of a collective identity, as well as assess the democratic governance structures suitable to navigate this relationship in community gardens. It will explain which values underlie the decision-making processes, how they impact community-building, and which democratic processes are best suited to navigate potential tensions in values in community gardens.
The PhD candidate will be part of a cross-section collaboration between the Environmental Governance and the Innovation Studies group at the
Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development (Faculty of Geosciences). The candidate will be supervised by
Dr Julia Tschersich,
Dr Tina Venema and
Dr Giuseppe Feola.
This PhD project will address the following research questions:
- What role do collective values play in democratic decision-making and engagement in community gardens
- How do individual values influence social identification with the community garden and engagement in group activities, and how does this change over time?
- How are collective identities constructed in community gardens, and what is the role of individual values, group dynamics and processes of decision-making and engagement?
- What implications can be derived from this research for strengthening community gardens and their contribution to sustainability transitions?
This PhD position is an exciting opportunity to investigate the potential of community gardens and other grassroots innovations to contribute to a just sustainability transition of the food system, as it has implications for the potential of communities to reach broader participation while maintaining their key identity and transformative potential.
This project will be based on transdisciplinary research in close collaboration with community gardens in the Netherlands and a second country that will be determined together with the PhD candidate based on scientific relevance, the candidate's interests and language skills. This project will apply a mixed methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative research methods, including literature review, interviews, surveys, participatory observation and transdisciplinary workshops.
This six-year position consists of 60% research on the project described above and 40% teaching
. The candidate is expected to obtain a doctoral degree from Utrecht University within six years, based on published articles in top-tier academic journals. In addition, it is possible to obtain the
University Teaching Qualification.