Postdoctoral Research Associate in Human Geography

The Role and Department

The Department of Geography at Durham comprises 65 academic staff (approximately equally divided between Human and Physical geography), a graduate school of around 100 research students, around 40 taught postgraduate students and 850 undergraduates. The Department is well supported with technical staff, including a cartography unit, and administrative staff.

We are seeking to appoint a 3 year Postdoctoral Research Associate in Human Geography to work within the Leverhulme Trust funded project “Unfeeling climate change: Disaffection and the climate crisis”.

Unfeeling climate change focuses on how, why and with what consequences the climate crisis is lived and felt through ‘disaffected feelings’ - boredom, numbness, indifference, and other forms of disaffection. It will investigate how disaffected feelings emerge, happen and change, and their consequences for climate (in)action across business, policy, art, activism and everyday life. The project aims: to gather new empirical material on how ‘disaffected feelings 2019; are represented, encountered and experienced, and governed in relation to the climate crisis; to understand the relations between ‘disaffected feelings’ and forms of climate (in/non) action; and to develop a new conceptual framework for understanding the relation between feelings and the climate crisis. The research has two work packages. Work Package 1 - Mediating Climate Change - involves interviews with actors of four types on how disaffected feelings are problematised and governed in their work, as well as how disaffected feelings emerge for them (policy makers and practitioners, businesses, media creators, and artists). Work Package 2 - Encountering Climate Change – uses diary work, interviews, and other qualitative methods to follow how disaffected feelings surface in people’s everyday life in the North-East, England as they encounter climate change.

The successful applicant will work alongside Prof. Ben Anderson (PI, Department of Geography, Durham University) and Prof. Lauren Rickards (Sociology, La Trobe University) on the project.

The primary duties will be to contribute to the development of the project’s conceptual approach and to the preparation and planning for the research, undertake research across the two work packages, organise project meetings and workshops, and contribute to the writing up and dissemination of the research to multiple academic and non-academic audiences.

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