4 PhD Candidates for Research Project 'Political Animals' (# of pos: 4)

The University of Amsterdam's Department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development Studies (GPIO) welcomes applicants for four PhD positions within the research project ANIMAPOLIS ("Political Animals: A More-than-human Approach to Urban Inequalities"), funded by a European Research Council Advanced Grant. All four positions start April 1, 2023 and will be embedded in the department's Urban Geographies programme group.

The ANIMAPOLIS project explores how animals' interactions with humans and infrastructures co-produce the unequal distribution of risks and resources across urban spaces and populations. It focuses on two critical urban domains, security and public health, that are often characterized by stark inequalities, and takes the role of key animals within these domains - dogs and rats, respectively - as an analytical entry-point. Through what mechanisms might security dogs co-produce practices of racial profiling, or distributions of rats affect public health outcomes? The project is led by Rivke Jaffe , who will also act as the PhDs' primary supervisor.

What are you going to do

As a PhD candidate, you will conduct long-term multispecies ethnographic research on either dogs and security, or rats and public health, and contribute to a comparative analysis of how animals, humans and infrastructures co-produce urban inequalities. Your fieldwork will be conducted in either Amsterdam or in Rio de Janeiro. Throughout your research, you will work closely with the other members of the research team in collaborative fieldwork and comparative analysis. If your focus is on dogs, you will research the outcomes of interactions and relations between security dogs, urban residents and security/policing professionals, and security infrastructures, in terms of the distribution of resources and risks including income, crime risks, police brutality and social stigma. If your focus is on rats, you will research the outcomes of interactions and relations between rats, urban residents and public health/sanitation professionals, and public health/sanitation infrastructures, in terms of the distribution of resources and risks including pathogens, rodenticides, social stigma and real-estate values.

Your work will include:

• conducting independent and collaborative field research in either Amsterdam or Rio de Janeiro;
• helping to co-design, test and finetune a multispecies methodological toolkit that includes multispecies ethnography, spatial methods and cultural analysis;
• writing and completing a PhD dissertation within four years;
• participating in the AISSR PhD program;
• 10% teaching;
• collaborating with supervisors and peers in research and publications;
• participating in conferences, workshops, seminars and other scholarly activities.