Offer Description
The PEPR TRANSFORM programme (CNRS, IRD), funded by France 2030, aims to help reverse, through transformational research, the current trends that are undermining human well-being and the living conditions of all living beings on Earth. To this end, the programme seeks to (i) advance understanding of the biophysical and social conditions of habitability, (ii) strengthen the co-construction of knowledge between researchers and territorial stakeholders, with a view to transformation towards greater…
sustainability and habitability, and (iii) address the question of upward and downward interactions across scales, so as to create the conditions for conducting socio-ecological experiments and drawing lessons from their diversity, thereby giving transformation a systemic character.
The researcher will be hosted at Pacte, a social science laboratory (Joint Research Unit, UMR 5194) of the CNRS, Université Grenoble Alpes and Sciences Po Grenoble – UGA, based mainly on the Grenoble Alpes university campus. Its members are committed to building common language and cross-cutting knowledge on the transformations of our societies in their political, territorial, sociological and ecological dimensions. The laboratory places interdisciplinarity at the heart of its practice, through the sharing and confrontation of methods, epistemologies and shared fieldwork. Pacte brings together geographers, political scientists, sociologists and urban planners, and also hosts economists and historians.
The successful candidate will help strengthen the laboratory's “Environments” research team, and in particular its “adaptation” research strand, which examines transition in territories through the lens of transformative processes.
The position is part of Target Project 1 of PEPR TRANSFORM, devoted to establishing the Transform-Institute, a body dedicated to research, training and experimentation on socio-ecological transformations and the conditions of habitability. The person recruited will contribute to the scientific thinking accompanying the institute's establishment, within an interdisciplinary framework bringing together science, arts and society, as well as to its operational and scientific set-up, drawing on the skills and networks of UMR Pacte.
The person recruited will contribute to the development of the Transform Institute as part of Target Project 1 (PC1). She will carry out theoretical, methodological and empirical work devoted to analysing and measuring the socio-ecological transformations brought about by first-person experiments. From a theoretical standpoint, the aim is to situate the notion of transformative experience within the field of environmental humanities and to examine its anthropological and spatial effects within the territories concerned. Working closely with interdisciplinary literature (philosophy, geography, anthropology, etc.) and empirical case studies, the objective is to develop a conceptual framework and indicators for describing, measuring and assessing how new imaginaries and transformative practices, grounded in the exploration of alternative subjectivities, which contribute to the shift towards more sustainable ways of life. By paying particular attention to how the transformation of subjectivities feeds alternative ways of 'place-making, the aim, in short, is to examine individual transformations and their local effects (particularly socio-political ones), as well as their contribution to the emergence of a post-growth society.
The position is part of Target Project 1 of PEPR TRANSFORM, devoted to establishing the Transform-Institute, a body dedicated to research, training and experimentation on socio-ecological transformations and the conditions of habitability. The person recruited will contribute to the scientific thinking accompanying the institute's establishment, within an interdisciplinary framework bringing together science, arts and society, as well as to its operational and scientific set-up, drawing on the skills and networks of UMR Pacte.
Tasks
- Contribute to the scientific debate on the interplay of scales between individual and territorial transformations, by developing a pluriversal approach to knowledge on societal transformations, drawing on the fields of philosophy, environmental humanities and more-than-human geography.
- Contribute to designing a conceptual framework and measurement indicators to assess socio-ecological transformations, and to document, compare and support individual and local transformations — arising in particular from experiments conducted in the Laboratoires Terrestres or other comparable initiatives.
- Apply the indicators developed in field-based case studies — while critically examining their relevance and scope — and thereby contribute to producing methodological resources from the work of the Institute and of the PEPR, aimed in particular, within PC1, at enriching the very notion of transformation.
Profile sought and required skills
Profile sought: Master's degree (research track) in philosophy or the social sciences (geography, anthropology, sociology, environmental humanities, etc.).
Required skills:
- Good knowledge of the main theoretical models and concepts of environmental humanities (philosophy, anthropology of nature, more-than-human geography, etc.).
- Command of qualitative methods (interviews, observation, analysis of corpora and discourse).
- Strong analytical, synthesis and academic writing skills.
- Ability to connect individual and territorial scales.
- Experience of working in inter- and transdisciplinary settings. Ability to help drive the scientific life of an interdisciplinary research group bringing together researchers in the humanities and social sciences and in the life and earth sciences.
Research experience on the transformative effects of projects carried out within action research aimed at socio-ecological transformation will be an asset.
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