"PhD position Social Innovation Initiatives in Rural Areas"

Job description

The geography group of the Faculty of Spatial Sciences at the University of Groningen is looking for a talented and motivated PhD researcher to carry out a PhD project within the umbrella theme ‘Social Innovation Initiatives in Rural Areas’. This position is part of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Doctoral Network (MSCA-DN) programme EPHEMERAL.

What are you going to do?

Rural place change over time interacts with the rural entrepreneurial agency of rural inhabitants. Rural entrepreneurship often involves social and community components and rural visions and attitudes. This PhD project studies the impact of place on social innovation initiatives in depopulating rural areas, such as community led village shops, community-run services, and other forms of social enterprises. The project aims to identify factors modulating the visions, attitudes and decisions of social entrepreneurial actors, and how they affect and are affected by changing rural places. The results will present “profiles” of entrepreneurs according to their social and professional experiences and their life trajectories across rural and urban places. The results will provide new knowledge about the personal networks of key actors (local and external) in entrepreneurship initiatives and highlight the tangible and intangible resources that nurture rural entrepreneurship over the life-cycle. Findings will also explore how entrepreneurs and their networks evolve as rural places change, providing an original contribution in understanding how actors’ motivations and networks relate to their attachment to rural places. This will make it possible to design recommendations for socially innovative initiatives among rural community organisations and policy-makers thereby contributing to place-based development.

The PhD project is part of the EPHEMERAL research project. EPHEMERAL – Entrepreneurship and Place: How Entrepreneurs Manage Evolving Relationships Across the Life-cycle – is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Doctoral Network (MSCA-DN) funded under Horizon Europe. The project aims to train a new generation of researchers to advance rural development theory and practice through entrepreneurship. EPHEMERAL explores how entrepreneurs shape rural places over time, considering life-cycle dynamics, evolving local contexts, and structural societal changes. The network includes five European universities and several non-academic partners, offering interdisciplinary supervision and training with a focus on rural entrepreneurship and development.

This position offers a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of social entrepreneurship, geography, and rural development in an international and interdisciplinary research project. As our new PhD student, you will play a central role in:

• Collecting and analysing qualitative and/or quantitative data as part of your study.
• Developing excellent and impactful research published in leading international journals. A PhD thesis consist of 4 first-authored articles at the level of international scientific journals, an introduction and a discussion. The thesis will be written in English.
• Preparing comprehensive analysis reports and contributing to high-impact research publications.
• Participating in dissemination activities to share findings with academic, industry, and public audiences.
• Participating in the EPHEMERAL network. This includes attending and participating in the project meetings and trainings as well as two secondments at the project partners University of Valencia and University of Southern Denmark.

Requirements

We are looking for a candidate with:

• A (Research) Master’s degree in a field of study relevant to the topic of the project (e.g. human geography, entrepreneurship, sociology, anthropology) or to be completed in the near future.
• A strong interest in rural development and interdisciplinary research.
• Good writing skills and fluency in English; preferably experience in academic writing.
• Strong conceptual thinking with the desire and capacity to relate theoretical topics to practical challenges and solutions, also in policies.
• Experience with mixed methods research (quantitative and qualitative methods).
• Strong motivation, good communicative skills in different settings (scientific and in the policy arena), and a proactive and independent work attitude.

Note: The position is part of the EPHEMERAL MSCA-DN and follows the MSCA mobility and eligibility rules. This means that you must not have resided or carried out your main activity (employment or study) in the Netherlands for more than 12 months in the last 36 months (MSCA mobility rule)

Conditions of employment

What can you expect from us?

• 232 vacation hours per year, based on a 38-hour workweek (1.0 FTE). You can also work more or fewer hours in exchange for more or fewer free hours. For example, with a 40-hour workweek, you save 96 extra free hours, and with a 36-hour workweek, you lose 96 hours.
• End-of-year bonus of 8.3% and 8% holiday allowance.
• Extensive opportunities for personal and professional development.