Funded PhD Opportunity with DANCING Project, an ALL Institute Project in the Dept. of Law

Thursday, October 15, 2020 - 09:45

Funded PhD Opportunity (DANCING Project)

48-months contract to start 1/1/21.
Department of Law & ALL Institute, Maynooth University
Application deadline 6/11/20

The Role

Maynooth University is committed to a strategy in which the primary University goals of excellent research and scholarship and outstanding education are interlinked and equally valued.

Due to recent success in obtaining ERC Consolidator funding, we are seeking a PhD researcher to join the DANCING project team. The project titled DANCING - Protecting the Right to Culture of Persons with Disabilities and Enhancing Cultural Diversity through European Union Law: Exploring New Paths, is a 5-year project led by Prof. Delia Ferri. DANCING will investigate the extent to which the protection of the right to take part in culture of people with disabilities and the promotion of cultural diversity intersect and complement each other in the European Union (EU) legal order. It will disrupt the conventional approach adopted by EU law scholarship by using a combination of legal, empirical and arts-based research to pursue three complementary objectives; experiential, normative and theoretical respectively.

We are looking to appoint a candidate to conduct research related to the project. The PhD student will support the Principal Investigator, Prof. Delia Ferri and post-doctoral researchers in conducting the research linked to the experiential objective of the project. The focus of the PhD will be related in particular but not exclusively to Task 1.4 of the project, which will aim to advance understanding of the extent to which the lack of accessibility and lack of recognition of disability identities affects the cultural domain. The PhD project will entail qualitative and quantitative analysis, and will require interviews to be conducted with, inter alia, umbrella organisations of cultural producers, artists, and cultural industries active at the European level. The PhD student will also support the post-doctoral researcher in gathering data through interviews with national key informants on disability, and will contribute to the arts-based research. The PhD researcher will be supervised by the P.I., Prof. Delia Ferri.

For this particular position, we are looking to appoint a candidate with basic knowledge of qualitative and quantitative research methods, and legal methods, and with an interest in cultural studies and/or disability studies. Experience of working in interdisciplinary research projects is desirable.
The scholarship will entail:

The scholarship will be for 4 years, subject to annual review with an anticipated commencement of January 2021
Full annual tuition fees support (approximately €6,500 per annum);
A fixed maintenance award of €18,000 per annum;
Participation in Departmental activities is encouraged.
The scholarship will be awarded to newly registered students only, for four years of study, subject to satisfactory annual review of progress in research.