Are you interested in international development, climate change and debates around loss and damage? Can you conduct ethnographic research in a setting where people are affected by toxic work and living environments and call for reparations? Do you want to push the boundaries of economic thought and practice? Then this job may be for you.
The Department of Anthropology at the
Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the
University of Amsterdam (UvA) is seeking a PhD candidate for four years for the project
‘Time to pay up? Reparations and global development challenges’ (REPAIR).
The REPAIR project studies ethnographically how reparations payments are justified, made and received around the world. Our research team consists of the principal investigator (PI)
Dr Felix Stein, a PhD candidate (this could be you!), a postdoctoral researcher, a junior researcher and an administrative assistant.
Together, we will ask:
- When and how reparations are established, paid and received in international development settings.
- What that teaches us about international development from a moral, political and economic perspective.
- How the global push for reparations challenges existing economic thought and practice.
We study these questions by asking people directly how they justify reparations claims and payments, what kind of harm they think can or cannot be repaired and what meanings they ascribe to money in these contexts. We also investigate which reparations programmes reach their stated goals, and how they challenge existing logics of international aid and investment. The project is funded by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council. The PhD track is part of the
Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), and this position is embedded in the
program group Moving Matters.
Your tasks - Your main task will be to develop your own PhD within the framework of the overall project i.e. to study reparations in the context of toxic environments. We have thought of a potential case study for you, namely to study US September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. However we are open to suggestions for an alternative case study that also deals with reparations for toxic environments;
- you are expected to conduct 12-months ethnographic fieldwork;
- next to working on and managing your own research, you will contribute to collaborative aspects of the project. This will include collecting data for jointly written publications and sharing expertise with team members;
- you will be asked to co-organize and participate in scholarly activities such as conferences, workshops and seminars and to contribute to popular dissemination of research results;
- you should be based in the Amsterdam area and take an active part in team meetings and the research environment at the AISSR;
- you will do some teaching (up to 10% of your time) and organisational support for the project leader will be part of your job responsibilities.