Despite robots increasingly entering our work lives, we know surprisingly little about their impact on jobs. Engineers are excited to build intelligent robotic applications with the aim to alleviate difficult, risky, or boring jobs, such as cleaning, bomb diffusion, transportation of goods or surveillance. Labor economists and public commentators, in turn, put forward gloomy scenarios of jobs becoming obsolete, degraded or void of meaning. Currently, however, we lack a rigorous insight into how robots are really used in situated work practice. Without such insight, engineers are in the dark about what impact robots have on work and have few methods of including work context into account when building robotic applications.
This NWO-funded Vidi project aims to generate such insight by conducting several ethnographic studies of professional service robots at work.
In this context, we are looking for candidates to fill two PhD research positions for a duration of four years. Starting date of the position is planned for October 2022.
Your duties
- You will design and conduct ethnographic studies of robotics focusing on how they are developed in the lab and how they are later used on the workfloor.
- You will be performing ethnographic fieldwork, conducting literature review, writing empirical research papers for conferences and journals, and presenting at conferences.
- You also follow PhD-level coursework and contribute to teaching.
- You will also collaborate with industry partners and organize workshops and symposia, disseminating your findings.