PhD position Social Innovation Initiatives in Rural Areas

The geography group of the Faculty of Spatial Sciences at the University of Groningen is looking for a talented and motivated PhD researcher to carry out a PhD project within the umbrella theme ‘Social Innovation Initiatives in Rural Areas’. This position is part of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Doctoral Network (MSCA-DN) programme EPHEMERAL.

What are you going to do?

Rural place change over time interacts with the rural entrepreneurial agency of rural inhabitants. Rural entrepreneurship often involves social and community components and rural visions and attitudes. This PhD project studies the impact of place on social innovation initiatives in depopulating rural areas, such as community led village shops, community-run services, and other forms of social enterprises. The project aims to identify factors modulating the visions, attitudes and decisions of social entrepreneurial actors, and how they affect and are affected by changing rural places. The results will present “profiles” of entrepreneurs according to their social and professional experiences and their life trajectories across rural and urban places. The results will provide new knowledge about the personal networks of key actors (local and external) in entrepreneurship initiatives and highlight the tangible and intangible resources that nurture rural entrepreneurship over the life-cycle. Findings will also explore how entrepreneurs and their networks evolve as rural places change, providing an original contribution in understanding how actors’ motivations and networks relate to their attachment to rural places. This will make it possible to design recommendations for socially innovative initiatives among rural community organisations and policy-makers thereby contributing to place-based development.

The PhD project is part of the EPHEMERAL research project. EPHEMERAL – Entrepreneurship and Place: How Entrepreneurs Manage Evolving Relationships

Across the Life-cycle – is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Doctoral Network (MSCA-DN) funded under Horizon Europe. The project aims to train a new generation of researchers to advance rural development theory and practice through entrepreneurship. EPHEMERAL explores how entrepreneurs shape rural places over time, considering life-cycle dynamics, evolving local contexts, and structural societal changes. The network includes five European universities and several non-academic partners, offering interdisciplinary supervision and training with a focus on rural entrepreneurship and development.

This position offers a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of social entrepreneurship, geography, and rural development in an international and interdisciplinary research project. As our new PhD student, you will play a central role in:

• Collecting and analysing qualitative and/or quantitative data as part of your study.
• Developing excellent and impactful research published in leading international journals. A PhD thesis consist of 4 first-authored articles at the level of international scientific journals, an introduction and a discussion. The thesis will be written in English.
• Preparing comprehensive analysis reports and contributing to high-impact research publications.
• Participating in dissemination activities to share findings with academic, industry, and public audiences.
• Participating in the EPHEMERAL network. This includes attending and participating in the project meetings and trainings as well as two secondments at the project partners University of Valencia and University of Southern Denmark.

We are looking for a candidate with:

• A (Research) Master’s degree in a field of study relevant to the topic of the project (e.g. human geography, entrepreneurship, sociology, anthropology) or to be completed in the near future.
• A strong interest in rural development and interdisciplinary research.
• Good writing skills and fluency in English; preferably experience in academic writing.
• Strong conceptual thinking with the desire and capacity to relate theoretical topics to practical challenges and solutions, also in policies.
• Experience with mixed methods research (quantitative and qualitative methods).
• Strong motivation, good communicative skills in different settings (scientific and in the policy arena), and a proactive and independent work attitude.

Note: The position is part of the EPHEMERAL MSCA-DN and follows the MSCA mobility and eligibility rules. This means that you must not have resided or carried out your main activity (employment or study) in the Netherlands for more than 12 months in the last 36 months (MSCA mobility rule)

• 232 vacation hours per year, based on a 38-hour workweek (1.0 FTE). You can also work more or fewer hours in exchange for more or fewer free hours. For example, with a 40-hour workweek, you save 96 extra free hours, and with a 36-hour workweek, you lose 96 hours.
• End-of-year bonus of 8.3% and 8% holiday allowance.
• Extensive opportunities for personal and professional development.

The Faculty of Spatial Sciences (FRW) is an interdisciplinary faculty that makes a significant impact on societal issues such as climate, broad prosperity, population decline, healthy ageing, and sustainable energy. With approximately 100 staff and over 100 PhD students, we engage daily in up-to-date and relevant teaching and research in the fields of planning, demography, and geography. Through our research programme TRACE (Transformations, Communities, and Environments), we are committed to internationally oriented, interdisciplinary research. With two Bachelor's and seven Master's programmes, the Faculty offers broad educational opportunities to about 1,100 students from around the world. The Faculty of Spatial Sciences plays a crucial role in understanding and shaping the living environment of the future. We work for and with society. Our motto is: we are making places better together. If you would like to learn more, visit rug.nl/frw. 

Our research programme is titled TRACE (TRAnsformations, Communities and Environments) and our ambition is to create scientific and societal impact by undertaking cutting-edge research at the interface of people, places, and planning in rural and urban settings, especially at local and regional scales, in the Netherlands, Europe and globally. With two Bachelor and six Master’s programmes, we provide a wide range of courses in the fields of geography and spatial sciences.

The Department of Cultural Geography, in which the position will be based, is one of the four departments in the faculty and it offers an open and friendly academic environment with an international staff. The department has 12 members of staff and 25 PhD researchers. The University of Groningen has a strong reputation as one of the main centres in regional science globally. In terms of teaching, the department of Cultural Geography contributes to the bachelor Human Geography and Planning and the Master’s programme Economic Geography: Sustainable Rural Futures. Our research focusses on how senses of place and identity influence the ways people experience and respond to spatial transformations in rural, urban and virtual communities. We do this from varying angles, including community engagement, quality of life and wellbeing, socio-spatial inequalities and (in)justice, heritage, perceptions of landscape change, social impact assessment, culture and art, and social aspects of new technology.

As part of EPHEMERAL you also work with other PhD candidates in the project and senior scholars across Europe. This includes participation in six international training weeks, and international secondments with academic and non-academic partners.

Do you have any questions or need more information?

Questions about the content of the job?
Tialda Haartsen (Full Professor): T.Haartsen@rug.nl

Questions about your application process?
Koen Salemink (Assistant Professor): K.Salemink@rug.nl