PhD Fellowship in the field of The ’Return Turn’ in Danish Politics 2020, Aarhus University, Denmark

The Graduate School at Arts, Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University, in collaboration with the Research Council of Norway, invites applications for a fully-funded PhD fellowship in The ’Return Turn’ in Danish Politics: Everyday Life of Somali and Syrian Refugees under Temporary Protection provided the necessary funding is available. This PhD fellowship is available as of 1 September 2020 for a period of up to three years (5+3). The candidate who is awarded the fellowship must commence his/her PhD degree programme on 1 September 2020. 

The PhD fellowship will be financed by the 2 parties.

The PhD fellowship is advertised within the field of The ’Return Turn’ in Danish Politics: Everyday Life of Somali and Syrian Refugees under Temporary Protection.

OVERALL project: Temporary protection as a durable solution? The ‘return turn’ in asylum politics in Europa (TemPro, 2020-2023)

The research project TemPro is a collaboration between legal scholars and anthropologists in Norway, UK and Denmark that explore the temporality and consequences of temporary protection in the current asylum- and refugee systems.
   Many countries in Europe, including Denmark, have responded to recent refugee flows by introducing new and enhanced measures oriented towards the swift return of refugees to their countries of origin. These include separate regimes of short-term protection and regular reviews to identify people who no longer have a need for asylum (In Denmark referred to as paradigmeskiftet). TemPro focus on the so-called ‘return turn’ in refugee policies in the Denmark, Norway and UK to create new knowledge about the effects of temporary protection for refugee inclusion, for welfare state institutions, and for regional and international refugee law.
   The increased legal fragmentation of refugee protection raises complex questions that require interdisciplinary approaches. TemPro’s contribution to this emerging research field is to unpack the complexity of constructed, contested and performed temporalities involved in the ‘return-turn’ trend in refugee protection. As such, we will interrogate how notions of temporality inform different aspects of refugee law, how refugee law and policy structure time, and how this intersect with other social times shaped by religious cosmologies, cultural imaginaries, social and economic institutions, interpersonal relationships, bodily process etc. that frame refugee’s everyday lives and position in society.    
   TemPro promote the two concepts of ‘legal consciousness’ and ‘precarious inclusion’ as tools for the inter-disciplinary collaboration between legal scholars and anthropologists. ‘Precarious inclusion’ as a concept seeks to conceptualize how tensions that simultaneously cut through law, policy, and practice can produce ambiguous and simultaneous processes of inclusion and exclusion. ‘Legal consciousness’ in its simplest definition refers to what people do as well as say about law. It has been used to explain how laws are understood, contested and internalised.
   Applicant should submit a five pages PhD proposal that outline an ethnographic research project focussing on how Somali and Syrian refugees cope with living under temporary protection in Denmark. The PhD proposal should be aligned with the overall framework of the TemPro-project (Please contact Mikkel Rytter for the full TemPro-project description) and include sections on ‘state of the art’, methodology, ethics and a timetable.
   We welcome proposals that suggest creative ethnographic methods and/or applied research in collaboration with relevant NGOs and stakeholders.
   The successful candidate should have a background in anthropology, sociology, human security or migration studies.
   Fluency in a Scandinavian language and Arabic or Somali will be an advantage. 

Professor MSO Mikkel Rytter, Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University will be the main supervisor. The successful candidate should expect a three-month research stay at Bergen University with co-supervisor, Researcher Marry-Anne Karlsen.

For more information click "LINK TO ORIGINAL" below.