PhD Conflict and Reconciliation

Project Description
What is needed to maintain peace or to prevent conflict, either within or between countries? And what are viable ways to deal with conflicts and tensions when they occur? Although researchers and policy-makers have debated these issues over the past decades, ordinary people’s perspectives in this regard have been largely underrepresented in current theorizing on this topic. Nevertheless, people may have different interpretations of what peace and conflict is, what may threaten it or what is needed to accomplish or resolve it. Such perceptions are likely to be shaped by the broader societal context in which they live as well, and the various social expectations and representations that may exist in this regard (e.g., in the media, in political discourse). This project aims to gain more insight into these issues, combining insights and methods from political sciences, communication, anthropology, and (social) psychology. During this project, you will conduct several studies and write a dissertation. We also ask you to spend 10% of your time on teaching.

The successful candidate will be based at the Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication (TiCC). Researchers in TiCC explore social and cognitive aspects of human interaction through a multidisciplinary approach, combining careful experimentation with survey methods, interviews, corpus analyses and computational modelling. Core research domains include (in alphabetical order) communication and technology, cross-cultural communication, information visualization, language production, new media design, social media research, and non-verbal communication.