Postdoctoral Fellowship (12) at University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

As a postdoctoral researcher in Entangled Freedoms, you will be joining the growing Project Team that currently has 2 PhD researchers (working on artistic/cultural archives of Pakistan and East Pakistan/Bangladesh between 1940s-1980s) and 2 Postdoctoral scholars (working on infrastructures of transnational solidarities and Arab aesthetics/poetics).

You will be expected to work on intellectual histories of (visual) art and Afro-Asian liberation movements, and contribute to the project’s core question: How did artists and cultural thinkers from the decolonizing worlds of 20th-century Asia, Africa, and the Middle East imagine and intervene in plural, contesting ideas of “freedom”?

You may work with a range of visual forms – spanning the plastic arts, documentary practices including photography, cinema as well as illustrated periodicals, graphic/print cultures, and exhibition cultures.

We are seeking for two ambitious postdoctoral researchers for the interdisciplinary Research Priority Area AI & Politics. As artificial intelligence (AI) diffuses through our lives, it reconfigures central aspects of politics and society as we know it. It affects political deliberation as well as how and to whom public services are delivered.  It  also  transforms  political  issues  into  technical  problems  to  be  solved  through  private  means,  thus  replacing or   democratic  institutions  with  private  interests.  Fuelled  by  rapidly  expanding  automated  data  collection,  AI  is  an  influential  tool  in  the  hands  of  the  powerful,  while also opening novel avenues for resistance.

We are looking for two independent, result-oriented, and ethically minded Postdoctoral Researchers who care about journalism and documentary-making, have strong expertise in qualitative research methods, and are interested in investigating the emotional and bodily dimensions of media work.

As a Postdoctoral Researcher, you will conduct research within a larger project examining the epistemic value of emotions and bodies in journalism and documentary-making. The project seeks to empirically, theoretically, and practically integrate emotions and bodies in journalism and documentary work, and involves ethnographic research across Central and Eastern Europe and an experiment with nature retreats for media professionals.
You will be responsible for conducting ethnographic research among media professionals covering politics, conflict, or culture – in particular, either investigative journalists and documentary makers, or artists-journalists and cultural journalists – in two countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Postdoc 1 will focus on investigative journalists and documentary makers in Slovakia and Hungary, Postdoc 2 will focus on cultural and artistic journalists in Czechia and Poland. You will closely collaborate with Johana Kotišová as the principal investigator, and two other doctoral and postdoctoral researchers working on the other CEE countries, Ukraine, and Georgia.

The project conceptualizes firms as social environments that differ in authority structures, work intensity, technological change, and workplace culture. These organizational differences can systematically affect workers’ mental health, for example through exposure to stress, insecurity, or limited control at work. Mental health, in turn, shapes careers by influencing sickness absence, job mobility, and long-term wage growth. You will study when and for whom mental health functions as a mechanism linking firm contexts to unequal career trajectories.

Your research addresses a central theoretical question: how do differences between firms translate into persistent career inequality through workers’ (mental) health

Empirically, you will work with rich longitudinal linked employer–employee data combined with population-wide health registers, focusing primarily on the Netherlands and Norway. These data make it possible to follow workers and firms over long periods and to identify how firm-level conditions are associated with mental health outcomes and subsequent career inequality.

The PHYVIR project: One of the major challenges in oceanography is how to capture biological processes in mathematical models used for e.g. climate predictions. Despite their minute size, marine phytoplankton are vital for marine ecosystem productivity and play a key role in global carbon and nutrient cycling. However, like all life on Earth, phytoplankton are susceptible to viral infections. Viral-induced lysis of phytoplankton cells redirects the flow of energy and elements, with expected far-reaching consequences for ocean ecosystem structure and functioning.

Still, phytoplankton viral lysis rates are poorly constrained; to what extent viral infections affect phytoplankton stoichiometry and functional traits, as well as how this is influenced by global (climate -induced) environmental stressors, is understudied; and a comprehensive understanding of the geographical distribution of viruses and phytoplankton hosts is lacking. Moreover, virus-host dynamics in global ecosystem and biogeochemical models are generally poorly addressed. 

The PHYVIR project aims to integrate complementary expertise – developing and applying mathematical models and bioinformatics to viral ecology, phytoplankton physiology and biological oceanography – to bridge the knowledge gaps that limit our current understanding and predictive power of how viral infections impact phytoplankton communities and global biogeochemical fluxes.