Is interdisciplinary research one of your key interests? We are looking for a PhD to join the DCC-funded project ‘Delta Values’ led by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Utrecht University and University College Roosevelt to understand how residents have been living, live, and foresee their future in Zeeland, considering the presence of hazards, and how are they adapting to the current and future changes of the environment.
About the projectIn the project ‘Delta Values’, academics together with educational and social partners in Zeeland province explore how communities of Zeeland can be supported to better coexist with their local environment, by engaging with local histories, and accessing the power of narratives to co-create hopeful narratives around life in a constantly shifting deltaic ecosystem.
Zeeland is a territory with a long history of living with floods and related issues. Climate change is today increasing the risk for both floods and drought, while sea level rise and the overexploitation of the fresh water table exacerbate salinisation. The goal of the project is to understand how residents have been living, live, and foresee their future in Zeeland, considering the presence of hazards, and how they adapt to the current and future changes of the environment. The PhD project is a pilot for an interdisciplinary learning trajectory of 4 years collaborating between different social sciences and the humanities, but also with a range of educational and societal partnerships.
The interdisciplinary focus is prominent in the PhD project. From a psychological perspective, it can be explored how people’s perceptions, social norms, and local practices are associated to people’s acceptance of local adaptation measures, including traditional and nature-based solutions.
There is a historical dimension to this project, which explores how adapting to change in a fluid, deltaic environment has been a feature of life in Zeeland for many centuries, and seeks to recover hopeful narratives of adaptation that can inform and inspire future visions for coexisting with nature, including natural hazards. The rich archival holdings and cultural heritage collections of Zeeland can be leveraged to inspire new generations by highlighting the resilience of their ancestors.
The cultural anthropological perspective explores people’s values and their relationship to their environment to understand how people feel connected to their place and their community, and how people frame the future of the landscape, their place and their community.
Key partnerships The
DCC hosts a group of scholars and PhD students working on three distinct iconic projects, Delta protein, Flexible deltas, and ProceZ (deltaclimatecenter.nl) with which the PhD is encouraged to network and seek collaboration opportunities. The Delta Values project shows promising areas of thematic points of reference with each of these iconic projects, while the nature and extent of specific collaboration may depend on the profile and interests of the selected candidate. The Delta Protein project seeks to explore and promote the potential of sustainable sea-derived proteins in Zeeland; a contribution of the Delta Values team could be to highlight the role that food production plays in driving attachment to deltaic landscapes, and considers ready availability of food resources as a motivator for living with risk in historical perspective. The Flexible Deltas project focuses on nature-based solutions and how people and nature can work to increase climate resilience; to this, the Delta Values team contributes a cultural and psychological perspective, seeking to integrate culture-based solutions with Flexible Delta’s nature-based one. The Delta Values team seeks to explore factors that can promote or deter communities or individuals from embracing nature-based solutions for climate resilience. Finally, the ProceZ project focuses on propelling a circular and biobased economy in Zeeland, to which the Delta Values team could contribute a historical and culturally grounded perspective. The communities of Zeeland have been drawn to constantly evolving deltaic landscapes in part due to the abundance of sustainable natural resources and materials growing there. The harvesting and use of renewable, low carbon materials like reed and willow are a part of Zeeland’s cultural heritage but could also play a key role in the future. The tensile strength of a material like reed or willow can be taken as a metaphor for the resilience and adaptability of Zeeland’s human and more than human communities. For any of these projects, collaborations with the Delta Values team could be developed into a final public-facing event involving various groups of residents, perhaps including a creative workshop and exhibition.
At
Utrecht University, two communities are related to the DCC. The Water, Climate and Future Deltas (WCFD) is one of the thematic communities of the Pathways to Sustainability programme. The WFCD community is a platform for scientists and stakeholders to jointly work on ensuring resilient, sustainable deltas all over the world. The Utrecht University DCC community is involved in various DCC projects, in which members of the WFCD community – among others – are participating.
Your role in the projectYou will focus on studying the relationship between human and the landscapes of Zeeland, and how this relationship has developed, changed, and is changing. This involves understanding the significance of the landscape for how people interact with one another, and how local ecosystems shape and are shaped by social relations at community level. You explore how people construct and use narratives of risk and behaviour of land and water and how they deal with changes in the landscape and risks. You will also study how different groups of residents communicate around risk, how they navigate the need to adapt to the changing landscape in their daily life, and how they envisage the future. Methods for engaging groups of residents will include interviews, document analysis, questionnaires and futuring, i.e. future thinking or imagination of the future.
The project ‘Delta Values’ is a developing network of partnerships, combining their own research and/or educational projects. Within the Delta Values team, the PhD student will have their own clearly defined tasks, co-developed with the supervisory team.
What will you do? - collect and analyse data on past, current and future relationships with the landscape and attitudes to environmental adaptation by oneself and in collaboration with other DCC partners.
- collaborate and contribute to furthering the partnerships or attracting new ones.
Additionally, you are expected to: - either relocate to Vlissingen, or commit to spending a substantial portion of working hours there, based at the pioneering and newly established Delta Climate Center (DCC).