Research Assistant

Applications are invited for a temporary post of a Research Assistant within UCD School of Politics and International Relations.

The School of Politics and International Relations (SPIRe) at University College Dublin is looking for a full-time research assistant with fluency in Arabic. The candidate will be expected to work independently to collect and analyze secondary interviews and other primary sources in Arabic. The ideal candidate will be proactive, well-organized, and team-oriented. They will be expected to organize themselves to meet various deadlines throughout their appointment.

The candidate will conduct online research in Arabic to identify secondary interview data with Arabic- speaking conflict participants. Since secondary interviews are often difficult to locate, this task requires the ability to come up with creative research strategies, and to systematically implement these strategies with regard to different types of conflict participants and conflict settings.

The candidate will moreover apply qualitative research methods to systematically code the interviews, line by line, to identify so-called cognitive maps, which visualize the interviewees’ reasoning processes. This task requires careful and attentive reading of the interview data, with a focus on the grammatical structure of every single sentence contained by an interview.

The candidate will moreover be asked to assist the construction of an Arabic dictionary for sentiment analysis. This will require them to carefully read long lists of Arabic words and assign values (positive, negative, neutral) and categories (discrete emotions of anger, fear, and others) to these words.  

SPIRe is ranked among the top 100 departments of Political Science. The research assistant will be part of a team implementing a project on female agency in conflict. The project investigates the role of women in conflict through the eyes of both male and female participants.

Fixed salary: €30,192 per annum

Closing date: 17:00hrs (local Irish time) on 20th of October 2022.

Applications must be submitted by the closing date and time specified. Any applications which are still in progress at the closing time of 17:00hrs (Local Irish Time) on the specified closing date will be cancelled automatically by the system. UCD are unable to accept late applications.

UCD do not require assistance from Recruitment Agencies. Any CV's submitted by Recruitment Agencies will be returned.

Prior to application, further information (including application procedure) should be obtained from the Work at UCD website: https://www.ucd.ie/workatucd/jobs/ .