Doctoral Researcher, Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities; MITIME position

Organisation/Company University of Oulu Research Field Anthropology » Cultural anthropology Anthropology » Social anthropology Sociology » Other Researcher Profile First Stage Researcher (R1) Final date to receive applications 6 Mar 2026 - 21:59 (UTC) Country Finland Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Horizon Europe - MSCA Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure?

No

The University of Oulu is a multidisciplinary, international research university, with about 4000 employees who produce new knowledge based on high-standards research and provide research based education to build a more sustainable, smarter, and more humane world. The University of Oulu community has about 17,000 people in total. Our northern scientific community operates globally and creates conditions for the emergence of innovations.

We are now looking for

a Doctoral Researcher in Anthropology of Migration (MITIME PhD position #6)

to join the Cultural Anthropology programme at the Faculty of Humanities. This position is one of four Oulu-based doctoral researcher positions on MITIME (“Entanglements of Migration and Time in Post-industrial Urban Europe”), an EU-funded doctoral programme. MITIME is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network focusing on how time shapes migration, inequality, and urban life in post-industrial Europe. It offers international, interdisciplinary, and intersect oral training to 15 recruited early-stage researchers across partnered European universities.

For more information on the MITIME doctoral programme,  .

About the job

You will work as a doctoral researcher as part of the MITIME training programme, and will conduct original research focused on migration, temporality, and urban inequalities. You will participate in all MITIME network-wide training and mobility activities, take part in planned secondments, and actively contribute to programme initiatives in academic and societal engagement and knowledge exchange. You will also play an active role in the dynamic intellectual environment at Oulu’s Faculty of Humanities.

The thesis topic you will work on is preliminarily entitled “Belonging and non-belonging in/to the Urban Future”. This doctoral project examines how the imagination of post-industrial urban futures in Europe are shaped by narratives of contemporary and historical industrial migration. The project analyzes the cases of post-industrial cities in Finland and Germany to consider the role of past and present labour migration in urban (re-)development and branding.

Alongside the diverse trajectories of labour migration, it considers ongoing socio-economic transformations that influence future planning and image-making, including local ecologies and the so-called urban-rural divide. Research will think through possible tools for translating migrant histories into urban and peri-urban development processes. Methodologically, this thesis is grounded in multi-modal ethnographic research conducted across Finland and Germany. It also employs critical discourse analysis of city branding and policy materials.

Two three-month secondments are planned as part of the position: (1) to Ruhr University Bochum to work with the co-supervisor on policy analysis and on visual walking methods for documenting eligibilities of migration and labour; (2) with the City of Oulu migration department for learning about urban policies and city branding initiatives related to labour migration and recruitment of international labour.

The project’s primary supervisor is Prof. Roger Norum (University of Oulu). The co-supervisor is Dr. Katrin Menke (Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany).

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