The Department of Sociology at Umeå University is looking for a postdoctoral fellow. The employee will be part of the NordForsk financed project "PastForward: The political uses of the past in digital discourses about Nordic futures". The employment is for 2 years and starts on September 1st 2024 or by agreement.
The Project is a collaboration between Assistant Professor Manuel Menke (Copenhagen University - PI), Associate Professor Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk (Olso Metropolitan University), Assistant Professor Katarina Pettersson (University of Helsinki), and Associate Professor Samuel Merrill (Umeå University). It will study the use of the past in the digital campaign material and social media content of political parties in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland during the build-up to these countries’ most recent past elections. Its focus concerns which pasts Nordic political parties refer to in their communication, how they embed the past in visions of the future, and how they strategically employ the past to create a sense of collective identity and shared interest to connect with potential voters. The main objective of PastForward is to gain insights into the political uses of the past in the Nordic region to understand how futures are negotiated based on legitimacy claims derived from collective memories and histories. This is relevant because the inclusion or exclusion of specific groups and their pasts within the national imagined community can have an impact on the sense of belonging and representation and ultimately on social cohesion in Nordic societies. Therefore, the project not only researches the campaign communication to identify which references to the past are made and how the past is used to engage potential voters but also how this communication resonates in discourses among citizens, politicians, journalists, activists, and others responding on social media.
The advertised position relates primarily to the Sweden and Finland cases and will be supervised by DIGSUM-researcher Samuel Merrill at Umeå University’s Department of Sociology with the remote support of Katarina Pettersson (University of Helsinki). During the project a second post-doctoral fellow, with whom the recruited individual will also work, will be based at Copenhagen University (focusing primarily on the Danish and Norwegian cases).
The recruited employee is expected to conduct and publish academic research related to the project's objectives. Specifically, the employee is expected to be able to understand and analyze Finnish and possibly Swedish language material and to strengthen the project team's use of computational methods to collect and analyze social media data.
Deadline for application is the 7th of May.
More information about the position and application [here].