2 PhD Candidates for the project "Climate Citizenship" (4 years, full time)

Leiden University's Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology welcomes applications for PHD candidates for the research project "Climate Citizenship: Infrastructures, Environments, and Democracy in the Era of Climate Change," funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant (ERC-StG).

Climate Citizenship explores how adapting environments to climate change through new forms of nature-based infrastructure reshapes people's relationships with each other and the state. Examples range from green roofs and vertical gardens to urban parks, flood plains and more ambitious efforts to transform landscapes. The project treats these infrastructures as social and political as well as environmental experiments. It asks: when and who do they stimulate behavioural change, create new alliances between stakeholders, or transform the division of rights and responsibilities within a society?

As a PhD candidate, you will conduct ethnographic research on these questions in either the Louisiana Delta (the United States) or the Tokyo Bay area (Japan). You will employ an "ecographic" research design, combining ethnographic methods with those from the ecological sciences in order to track how new forms of climate adaptation alter both environment and society. Your primary supervisor will be the project's Principal Investigator, Dr. Andrew Littlejohn.

 

For more information, please see the advert: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/vacancies/2025/q1/15477-2-phd-candidates-for-the-project-climate-citizenship

 

The deadline is March 31.

 

If you have questions, please contact the PI at: a.l.littlejohn@fsw.leidenuniv.nl

 

Kind regards,

 

Dr. Andrew Littlejohn
Assistant Professor | Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology | Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences | Leiden University | 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands

 

PI ERC Starting Grant "Climate Citizenship"

 

Selected publications:

"Ruins for the Future: Critical Allegory and Disaster Governance in Post-Tsunami Japan." American Ethnologist 48 (1): 7-21.

"The Potential of Intangible Loss: Reassembling Heritage and Reconstructing the Social in Post-Tsunami Japan. Social Anthropology 29 (4): 944-959.