Opportunity for the researchers at The Institute of Advanced Studies
Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences was founded in 2015. It is based at the heart of UCL’s Bloomsbury Campus in a suite of rooms in the Wilkins Building South Wing. The IAS is a research-based community of scholars comprising colleagues and doctoral students from across UCL as well as visiting fellows and research collaborators/interlocutors from the UK and internationally. The IAS is committed to critical thinking and engaged enquiry both within and across conventional disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and aims to provide a creative and generative context in which to question and dislodge habitual practices and modes of thought. In particular, in the context of a major multi-disciplinary university, the IAS harnesses UCL’s extensive expertise across the humanities and social sciences, to investigate received wisdom, to bring the aesthetic and the political into dialogue with one another, to foster collaborative cutting-edge research, to identify and address the urgent ethical and intellectual challenges that face us today, and to confront our responsibilities as citizens of an increasingly contracting and inter-connected world, exploring our place (historically as well as spatially) within it.
Junior Research Fellows at the Institute of Advanced Studies
The Institute of Advanced Studies is seeking to appoint four Junior Research Fellows (JRFs) on appointments of 24 months each. Candidates should have recently completed (within five years) a PhD in one of the subject areas of either the Faculty of Arts & Humanities or the Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences, and should be able to contribute to one of the following research themes: Laughter or Turbulence.
Each theme is open to the widest possible interpretation and is assumed to address the concerns of many disciplines and departments while providing a frame for thinking across or even bypassing entrenched or established modes of thinking. It may be useful for prospective applicants to know that the conversations we have been having around each have included the following concerns:
Laughter- External expressions of merriment/amusement: its corporeal/cognitive dimensions
- The politics of laughter: irreverence, mockery, ridicule, revenge, revolutionary mirth/glee
- The aesthetics/poetics of laughter: satire, wit, comic forms, caricature and comedic creations
- The performance/production of laughter: stand up, clowning, mimicry, jokers and fools
- Technologies of laughter: canned, recorded, packaged, produced, pre-planned
- Laughter on line: happy emojis, lol, hahaha, mediations and manipulations of laughing in social networks and new media
- Laughter and feeling: reparation, catharsis, release, empathy
- Dark laughter: last laughs, gallows humour, hysteria, contagion, forced funniness, humiliation, hyperbolic horror
- Weaponised laughter: cruel jokes, taking the piss, winding some-one up, bullies and buffoons
- Defensive laughter: anxiety, embarrassment, fear, unease
- Representation/narration of laughter: infectious, unfunny, unpleasant, inappropriate, palliative
- The laughing body: incontinence, unruliness, excess, falling about, unravelling, porous, seeping
- Chaotic/unpredictable change: unsteady movement, elemental disturbance, liveliness of matter and mood, weather and wind
- Turmoil, instability, upheaval, tumult, unruliness, uncontrolled passions, confusion, unsettlement
- Turbulent times/journeys/environments: materials, flows, natural forces, economies
- Wild and erratic motion, force, intensity, feeling, velocity
- Unpredictability/instability/precarity: of markets, emotions, atoms and areas
- Disruption of forms/genres: radical destabilisation of conventions, precedents, procedures and norms
- Turbulence and aesthetics: melodrama, horror, noise, scale, the sublime
- Turbulence and subjectivity, psychological unpredictability
Duties and Responsibilities
The Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences, together with the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, established a UCL Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2015. The IAS is a research-based community of scholars comprising colleagues and doctoral students from across UCL as well as visiting fellows and research collaborators/interlocutors from the UK and internationally. It is committed to critical thinking and engaged enquiry both within and across conventional disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and aims to provide a creative and generative context in which to question and dislodge habitual practices and modes of thought.
The IAS is seeking to appoint four Junior Research Fellows (JRFs) starting on 1 October 2018 on appointments of 24 months each. Candidates should have recently completed a PhD in one of the subject areas of either the Faculty of Arts & Humanities or the Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences, and should be able to contribute to one of the following research themes: Laughter or Turbulence.
During Year 1, the JRF will be responsible for pursuing their own research and contributing to the culture of the IAS. In particular, they will convene a series of high profile academic and public engagement events in relation to their chosen theme.
During Year 2, the JRF will continue pursuing their own research whilst undertaking undergraduate teaching in a related discipline. In addition, they will be required to co-edit an appropriate special issue, anthology or online platform related to the programme of events convened in Year 1.
Key Requirements
Application
Application should include the following documents.
- A CV of no more than two pages, including the contact details of two referees
- A research proposal of no more than 500 words outlining the project, its relationship to the recently completed PhD and the envisaged outcomes (conceivably a couple of articles OR a significant and well-grounded research application in a new area of research, OR a book of the thesis OR other relevant outcome such as an edited volume)
- A 250-word statement on how the candidate’s research relates to the chosen theme.
- A 250-word proposal for activities based in the Institute of Advanced Studies that the JRF will generate: ideas for a series of seminars/workshops; an idea for one conference/event; one public engagement activity that will attract new publics/audiences.
Sections 2, 3 and 4 should be submitted as one document, with clearly labelled sub-headings. The theme and the chosen UCL department must be clearly stipulated at the top of the document. If you fail to do this, your application will not be considered.Applications will be assessed on the quality of the research proposal, relevance to the chosen theme AND the nature of the research-based activities proposed.
For more information click "LINK TO ORIGINAL" below.
This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/ias-news/ias-junior-research-fellowships-2018-19?utm_source=ARMACAD.info&utm_medium=ARMACAD.info