PhD Positions: Protest Music and Polarisation at Radboud University

The Department of Modern Languages and Cultures (Faculty of Arts) and specifically the Arts and Culture Expertise Unit at Radboud University in Nijmegen is looking for two highly motivated and talented PhD candidates to join the interdisciplinary research project ’Tuning into Tensions: Music and Affective Polarisation in Protest Movements’ led by principal investigator Prof. Dr Melanie Schiller.

This project is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and it is organised around the premise that democracies around the world are under increasing pressure, with affective polarisation posing a challenge to social cohesion. The project asks how music contributes to polarisation processes in contemporary protest movements relating to climate change in the Netherlands. The project aims to bring together the fields of culture and politics and will specifically conduct a comparative analysis of the music associated with Extinction Rebellion Nederland and the Dutch farmers’ protests, representing two opposing sides of the political spectrum.

As a PhD candidate, you will conduct theoretical and empirical research on protest, music and polarisation, focused on either the Dutch Farmers Movement or the Dutch branch of Extinction Rebellion. You and the other PhD candidate will have independent projects but will also collaborate and conduct comparative analyses. Familiarity and ideally experience with theoretical analytical and qualitative empirical methods in the humanities is expected (e.g. textual analysis, fieldwork, interviews). While not mandatory, a background in popular music studies would be preferred. Formal music analysis skills are not strictly necessary. Since the project is interdisciplinary by design, openness to work across the fields of (popular) music and political science as well as related fields is expected.

Your tasks and responsibilities include:
Submission of a PhD thesis within the period of appointment.
Participating in meetings of the project research group and workshops with project partners.
Publishing one single-authored, peer-reviewed article.
Writing one single-authored and one co-authored chapter for a project publication.
Presenting intermediate research results at international workshops and conferences.
Organising knowledge dissemination activities.
Participation in the Graduate School for the Humanities (GSH)and one of the national research schools in the Humanities, for instance the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA).
Active participation in the Media, Popular Culture and Social Change Research Group.
Teaching and co-teaching courses at the BA level and academic service.