Researcher HORIZON2020 - Under tillsättning eller tillsatt, ej sökbar

Researcher in Computational Social Science at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University

This is a full-time position within the Horizon2020 project PROTECT. The candidate will be embedded in an international consortium of 11 universities as well as in the local environment at Lund University (including the AI Lund network and the Lund University Humanities Lab). The employment is a permanent position from 15 January.

In short, the candidate must have

- A completed PhD degree in Social Science or Computer Science, demonstrating interdisciplinary skills

- Computational Social Science skills, especially as applied to social media data

- Documented English language proficiency (spoken and written)

About the project
This position as researcher is part of the Horizon 2020 project entitled ‘PROTECT: The Right to International Protection. A Pendulum between Globalization and Nativization?’ Conducted by an international consortium of 11 universities in Europe, Canada and South Africa, the project is led by Professor Hakan G. Sicakkan on behalf of the University of Bergen. The Lund University PI is Dr Anamaria Dutceac Segesten.

PROTECT will study the impacts of the United Nations’ ‘Global Refugee Compact’ (GRC) and ‘Global Migration Compact’ (GMC) on the functioning of the international refugee protection system. The entities focused on are the UNHCR and IOM (global level), the European Union and the African Union (regional level), EU countries, Canada and South Africa (state level), and Canadian, South-African and South-European border zones (the local level).

PROTECT engages in an extensive institutional, attitudinal, and media content data collection. As part of its empirical work, it aims to identify the changes in the notion of refugee protection due to the introduction of the two UN Global Compacts.

Lund University is co-leading Work Package 7, dedicated to the analysis of the media discourse around UN and migrants/refugees. More specifically, LUND covers the social media part of the discourse, whereas the University of Ljubljana covers traditional media discourses. The overall goal of WP7 is to chart and analyze the citizens’ recognition of human rights in the European public sphere.

The project tasks of the successful candidate
The successful candidate will contribute to the project’s collaborative research and international coordination tasks. The researcher is expected to code, and analyze social media data from across a series of platforms (Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and to some extent Facebook), as well as online forums and blogs.

We will support conducting additional independent research related to the project themes. Participation in collaborative dissemination activities such as co-authored paper production and presentations in PROTECT’s three international conferences is among the successful candidate’s dissemination tasks.

Concerning the international project coordination tasks, the successful candidate is expected to contribute to leadership tasks in the coordination of the work packages. The project coordination tasks are limited to maximum 25% of the position while the candidate is expected to use 75% of her/his time for research tasks. The position has no teaching obligations.

Further details about the project, research team and duties associated with the position can be obtained by contacting the Principal Investigator at Anamaria.dutceac_segesten@eu.lu.se.

Requirements
Candidates must have completed,a PhD degree in Social Science or Computer Science, demonstrating interdisciplinary skills. Experience with and knowledge about the UN and/or refugee/migrants is a strong plus.

Documented knowledge in programming skills related to data science (e.g., Python or R) is required, especially as applied to social media datasets. Ideally, you also have knowledge in methods like topic modeling, named entity recognition, social network analysis and mixed effects regressions. Data visualization is a plus.

Eligible candidates must have the ability to work both independently and as part of a team. The language of the consortium is English; thus, candidates need to provide proof of proficiency in both written and oral English.