"Doctoral Researcher in Anthropology of Migration (MITIME PhD position #6)"

The position is a doctoral researcher role within the MITIME (“Entanglements of Migration and Time in Post-industrial Urban Europe”) programme, an EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network exploring how time shapes migration, inequality, and urban life in post-industrial Europe. For more information on the MITIME doctoral programme, click here.

About the job

You will work as a doctoral researcher as part of the MITIME training programme, and will conduct original research focused on migration, temporality, and urban inequalities. You will participate in all MITIME network-wide training and mobility activities, take part in planned secondments, and actively contribute to programme initiatives in academic and societal engagement and knowledge exchange. You will also play an active role in the dynamic intellectual environment.

The thesis topic you will work on is preliminarily entitled “Belonging and non-belonging in/to the Urban Future”. This doctoral project examines how the imagination of post-industrial urban futures in Europe are shaped by narratives of contemporary and historical industrial migration. The project analyses the cases of post-industrial cities in Finland and Germany to consider the role of past and present labour migration in urban (re-)development and branding. Alongside the diverse trajectories of labour migration, it considers ongoing socio-economic transformations that influence future planning and image-making, including local ecologies and the so-called urban-rural divide. Research will think through possible tools for translating migrant histories into urban and peri-urban development processes. Methodologically, this thesis is grounded in multi-modal ethnographic research conducted across Finland and Germany. It also employs critical discourse analysis of city branding and policy materials. Two three-month secondments are planned as part of the position: (1) to Ruhr University Bochum to work with the co-supervisor on policy analysis and on visual walking methods for documenting eligibilities of migration and labour; (2) with the City of Oulu migration department for learning about urban policies and city branding initiatives related to labour migration and recruitment of international labour.