PhD Position in Children's Media and Diversity

Are you looking for a challenging position in a dynamic setting? The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) currently has a vacant PhD position as part of the Children's Media and Diversity project led by principal investigators Dr. Balazs Boross and Dr. Rik Spanjers. ASCA is one of the five Research Schools within the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research (AIHR).

The PhD fellow will be part of ASCA, one of the five Research Schools within the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research (AIHR) and the Media Studies department. ASCA is a research community devoted to the comparative and interdisciplinary study of culture (in all its forms and expressions) from a broad humanities perspective. ASCA is home to more than 120 scholars and 160 PhD candidates, and is a world-leading international research school in Cultural Analysis. ASCA members share a commitment to working in an interdisciplinary framework and to maintaining a close connection with contemporary cultural and political debates.

What are you going to do?

Children's media have long been treated with suspicion: educators, politicians, parents, and scholars want to know what children are learning, from whom, and in what contexts. As such, aesthetic, narrative, technological, and discursive shifts in and around children's content provide a productive lens for exploring how culture – at different times and at different places – defines what is normal and how attempts to challenge the status quo are imagined, represented, and articulated in social practice.

This PhD project takes the notion of diversity as its center of inquiry and examines how emergent understandings of diversity are mobilized, contested, and shared across the contemporary landscape of children's media. How is diversity discursively produced and translated for and by children? What are the implicit and explicit rationales to celebrate or question diversity? What kinds of stories of diversity are being told and in what forms, how are they received, and what kinds of practices surround them? What does the child implicated in these stories look like? Which aspects of diversity are considered normal, and which are problematized? How do the stories and images of children’s content connect to or provoke broader social debates? How do representations of diversity and the diversity of practices speak to, speak about, and relate to the politicization of children's media and childhood from a cross-cultural, socio-historical perspective?

Candidates can work on a project of their own choosing within the general theme of children's media and diversity, and are encouraged to think creatively in terms of research design. We invite interested candidates to prepare short proposals (details below) that might explore, for example:

• Representations of gender, race, disability, class and/or sexuality in animation, children's books, comics, games, social media, or other media
• Children and celebrity culture; vloggers and influencers
• Children and fandom
• Moral panics, discourses on diversity, and childhood ideologies
• Queer children, queer families and the queering of children's media
• Parental mediation, children, and technology
• Children's media use, identity, and everyday life
• Children as early adopters, target audiences, or future consumers of new media
• Transformations of childhood (and understandings of diversity) across different media ecologies
• Children's media from local and cross-cultural perspectives
• Media and early childhood

Tasks and responsibilities:

• submission of a PhD thesis within the period of appointment;
• participating in meetings of the project research group and developing a shared database;
• publishing single-authored and co-authored outputs derived from your PhD research, including peer reviewed academic articles;
• presenting intermediate research results at workshops and conferences, including at least one international conference outside of the Netherlands;
• organising knowledge dissemination activities;
• (co-)teaching courses at BA-level in the second and third year of the appointment (maximum 0,2 fte per year);
• participation in the Research School and Faculty of Humanities PhD training programmes.

What do you have to offer?

We are looking for intellectually curious, original, and versatile candidates who have experience or proven interest in working across genres, media and disciplinary boundaries.

Your experience and profile

Candidates need to have the following qualifications:

• a completed (research) Master's degree in media studies, cultural analysis, gender studies, disability studies, cultural anthropology, or a related discipline. You may apply if you have not yet completed your Master's degree only if you provide a signed letter from your supervisor stating that you will graduate before 01 February 2025;
• excellent research skills demonstrated by an outstanding Master's thesis and a demonstrable capacity to develop a track record of publishing in high-ranking journals and/or with leading presses;
• demonstrable knowledge of and experience with (most of) the following research methods: textual analysis (narrative, discourse, semiotic and visual analysis; digital analysis), ethnography (participant observation; individual interviews);
• a strong cooperative attitude and willingness to engage in collaborative research;
• enthusiasm for communicating academic research to non-academic audiences;
• excellent command of English.

Please note that if you already hold a doctorate/PhD or are working towards obtaining a similar degree elsewhere, you will not be admitted to a doctoral programme at the UvA.

What can we offer you?

We offer a temporary employment contract for the period of 48 months. The first contract will be for 16 months, with an extension for the following 32 months, contingent on a positive performance evaluation within the first 12 months. The employment contract is for 38 hours a week. The preferred starting date is 01 February 2025.

Your salary is in the first year of the employment contract € 2,872 and in the last year a maximum of € 3,670 gross per month on the basis of a full working week of 38 hours. This sum does not include the 8% holiday allowance and the 8,3% year-end allowance. Favourable tax agreements may apply to applicants moving from abroad. The Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities is applicable.

What else do we offer?

• PhD candidates receive a tuition fee waiver;
• PhD candidates have free access to courses offered by the Graduate School of Humanities and the Dutch National Research Schools;
• excellent possibilities for further professional development and education;
• an inspiring academic and international work environment in the heart of Amsterdam;
• an enthusiastic and professional academic team.