PhD candidates in International Political Sociology

The PhD candidates will be part of the interdisciplinary project “The Security Politics of Algorithmic Vision (Security Vision)” hosted at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University. The project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and led by Dr. Francesco Ragazzi. The Security Vision project investigates how technologies of computer vision work in practice in the field of security (smart CCTV, social media content moderation, border control, etc.), and what their ethical and political implications are. The project addresses these challenges through an innovative theoretical and methodological framework based on audio-visual and multimodal methods to advance debates in international politics. The project has three interrelated phases:

It will map the current field of computer vision institutions and technologies in the field of security, by constituting a dataset of actors, programs and applications, through multiple correspondence analysis and social network analysis. This first phase will produce, in addition to a textual analysis, several data visualization outputs.
On the basis of this mapping, the project will investigate both the algorithmic and the social logics of these technologies and the professionals who program, train and operate them. Visual ethnographies (filmmaking) will provide in-depth analysis of how computer vision works in practice.
Finally, by looking at the institutional and political context in which computer vision is being developed and utilised, the project analyses the ethical implications of these technologies on fundamental rights based on focus groups and expert interviews.