06 Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of Groningen, Netherlands

The environmental changes caused by mining and oil drilling have elicited a variety of political responses, ranging from organised protest movements to more everyday ways of accommodating extraction. Why did some adopt violent tactics or take to the streets, while others sued mining companies over pollution? This project aims to historicise these political responses and to understand why people reacted differently to environmental transformation. The postdoctoral researcher will be part of a larger team (PI, two PhD students, and one postdoctoral researcher on cultural production), collaborating closely with the Universities of Port Harcourt, Copperbelt University, the University of Pretoria, and local partners (including NGOs). This postdoctoral project offers a unique opportunity to work in an international research environment as well as to acquire valuable teaching experience (should the candidate be interested). In addition, the postdoctoral researcher will collaborate with the other team members to organise conferences and workshops, and to plan outreach activities.

A rich corpus of literary and musical production has engaged with the environmental changes caused by mining and oil drilling. The novels and poetry by Tanure Ojaide, Helon Habila, Peter Abrahams, Mongane Wally Serote, and Mukuka Chipanta, and the music of Fela Kuti, Rikki Ililonga, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo are prominent examples. Why did some of these works depict extraction as relatively unremarkable, while others condemned its effects as ‘ecocide’? This project aims to historicise cultural production and to understand why people reacted differently to environmental change. The postdoctoral researcher will be part of a larger team (PI, two PhD students, and one postdoctoral researcher on political ecology), collaborating closely with the Universities of Port Harcourt, Copperbelt University, the University of Pretoria, and local partners. This postdoctoral project offers a unique opportunity to work in an international research environment as well as to acquire valuable teaching experience (should the candidate be interested). In addition, the postdoctoral researcher will collaborate with the other team members to organise conferences and workshops, and to plan outreach activities.

As a postdoc, you will work together with Kerstin Bunte and her teamwithin the Intelligent Systems group, as well as a network of interdisciplinary collaborators in the UK and Europe from various fields, such as Computer Science, Engineering and Applied Mathematics. About the University of Groningen Since its foundation in 1614, the University of Groningen has enjoyed an international reputation as a dynamic and innovative center of higher education offering high-quality teaching and research. Balanced study and career paths in a wide variety of disciplines encourage currently more than 37,000 students and researchers to develop their own individual talents. Belonging to the best research universities in Europe and the top 100 universities in the world, the University of Groningen is truly an international place of knowledge.

The goal of “Healthy Living as a Service” is to improve people’s lifestyle. To enable this, users are supported by smart technologies which allow tracking of the own health status as well as environmental variables that might influence health. To support long lasting lifestyle changes the project will take an integrated approach including personal factors, the living environment, and the social context. Citizens from different areas of the Northern Netherlands (field labs), researchers, artists and industry are working in close collaboration within “Healthy Living as a Service”. Smart sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) used to monitor health and the living environment will support and motivate the users to make healthy choices and make lifestyle changes sustainable. Participants will become aware about the risks and benefits of using technology and data for health monitoring. This will enable them to make their own choices. Within the Discrete Technology and Production Automation group at the Faculty of Science and Engineering of the University of Groningen the decision support system that forms the backbone of this project will be developed. The decision support system is supposed to evaluate data from multiple wearables and nearables in real time and to derive the user state and health status from this data. This information will then be coupled to health advices and interventions that provide feedback to the user. The main challenge is to develop robust machine learning based algorithms that can quickly derive the necessary information from noisy, incomplete, real-world time series data.

The Beyond Boardrooms team consists of the PI, a postdoc and a PhD student. We aim to understand the extent to which corporate quotas, a novel policy instrument used across Europe to achieve a balanced representation of women in corporate leadership, are successful in achieving broader gender equality goals. Specifically, the project examines three interrelated questions: (1) how quotas affect women’s access to managerial positions and firms’ diversity policies and practices, (2) the extent to which these effects spill over into gender pay inequality and occupational gender segregation, and (3) whether the effects of quotas spill over across firms. The project focuses on two previously unstudied quota schemes, the Corporate Diversity Target (2013-2020) and the Corporate Quota (2022-2024). We innovatively combine data sources to form a Linked Employer-Employee (LEE) on earnings, occupation, and employment history of Dutch organizational leaders and employees, business registers on firm characteristics, and a Diversity Monitor survey on organizational HR practices and policies. In addition to research on the effects of quotas, the project aims to create a comprehensive open-access guide, the Netherlands Integrated Database of Inequality in Organizations (NIDIO), on how to build LEE data infrastructures for inequality research. Such guidelines are scarce, and NIDIO aims to be a reference for the growing community of labor market and inequality researchers using linked employer-employee register data. In addition to the scientific output, the project aims to provide insights to stakeholders (policy makers and companies) through an impact assessment report and workshops.

We are seeking a highly motivated candidate for a postdoc position within a project funded by the Templeton Foundation and the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, granted to Dr. Brian Ostafin and Prof. Dr. André Aleman. We offer a contract of 12 months, with an extension of 12 additional months being possible. Phenomenological perspectives of religion highlight the importance of religious or spiritual experiences. These experiences may occur through direct experiential contact with the transcendent or through mythic metaphor, which facilitates an intuitive identification and participation with the transcendent. Researchers have increasingly used cognitive science tools to better understand mental processes involved in religious experiences. The cognitive science approach to religion seeks to uncover how information is processed, stored and acted upon and how these processes underlie religious experience and behavior.