UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
ESRC CENTRE FOR RESEARCH ON SOCIO-CULTURAL CHANGE (CRESC)
AHRC Doctoral Studentship on Everyday Participation and Cultural Value
Applications are invited for a 3-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded PhD Studentship based at CRESC under the supervision of Dr Andrew Miles. The studentship comprises an annual stipend of £13,590 and payment of fees up to the level charged for UK/EU students (currently £3828; overseas students would need to pay the balance in fees themselves) and is available starting in either October 2012 or January 2013.
Understanding Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Values
This studentship forms part of a major interdisciplinary study of the relationship between participation and cultural value within the AHRC’s ‘Connected Communities’ programme (see UEP outline and UEP development project. Within this, the focus of the PhD will be on the potential and implications of different methodological approaches for revealing the nature and significance of informal participation practices. It might, for example, take the form of a case study of a particular activity or activities and the ways in which particular methods are implicated in their presentation and valuation by institutions, policy makers, within communities, etc., or it could explore the application and meshing of different data types and analytical techniques in order to better understand and demonstrate the meanings and ‘stakes’ of participation for those taking part, and for capturing the wider economic, social, cultural and political values that might attach to people’s day-to-day engagements.
The studentship offers the candidate an opportunity to conduct innovative work on methodologically driven understandings of participation, contributing to and benefiting from a potentially ground breaking strand of the wider Understanding Everyday Participation’ study’s work on interdisciplinary and mixed methods approaches to understanding participation and value. The PhD project will also map directly onto the work of the interdisciplinary themes ‘The Social Life of Methods’ and ‘Urban Experiments’ within CRESC, which has a lively and engaged international post-graduate community undertaking doctoral work on various aspects of socio-cultural change.
Candidates for this studentship might be drawn from a range of disciplines, including sociology, social anthropology, geography, history, social statistics, cultural policy and cultural economics.
Admissions Criteria
Applicants must have a first-class or high upper second-class honours degree (or equivalent qualification), preferably with a focus on methods and interdisciplinarity. They must also have a UK Masters degree (or overseas equivalent) in a relevant subject. Students from non-native English speaking countries must also satisfy the School’s English language requirements’s which are IELTS score of 7 with 7 in writing or TOEFL IBT score of 100 with 25 in each section. A track-record of engaging with research, which may include contributions to publications/articles, promoting research to a wider audience, prizes/accolades for previous research work, setting up research collaborations with other groups etc., is desirable.
How to apply
Applicants are required to provide: (i) a research proposal setting out the context, research question(s), proposed methods, and significance of their research. This should be no more than 1,000 words in length and should be referenced (references and bibliography should not be included in the word count); (ii) a statement of up to 300 words explaining how their proposed research relates to the PhD specification and to the larger ‘Understanding Everyday Participation- Articulating Cultural Values’ project; and (iii) a full CV.
Applications (research proposal, statement and CV) should be emailed to: andrew.miles@manchester.ac.uk. The successful candidate will be required to submit a full University of Manchester on-line application, plus supporting documents (two academic references and degree transcripts) to fulfill the normal admissions process.
Deadline
The deadline for applications is 17 September 2012. Candidates may be called for interview on 21 September 2012.
