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 #1)

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,  .

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 “Conviviality in Broken Times:
Temporal Insecurities and The Formation of Social Bonds in Post-Migration Cities”. Grounded in ethnographic research in Finland and Germany, this doctoral project examines conviviality in post-industrial cities where migrants and non-migrants live together. It investigates temporal dislocations caused by, e.g., restrictive migration regimes, economic restructuring, and neoliberal policies, looking at how temporal insecurity and inequality influence people's ability to form material, social, and digital connectivities.

In doing so, it looks into the links between temporal insecurities and people's ability to build and maintain long-term connections. Your research project will make use of an intersectional approach to flesh out how affordances of connectivity are influenced by various categories, such as migration status, racialized position, gender, class, age, and ability. Methodologically, the project relies on ethnography, making prior knowledge of qualitative methods, field research experience, and adequate language skills for interacting with migrant communities important assets.

Two secondments are planned: (1) at the co-supervisor's institution, University of Bochum, for training in sociological and transnational approaches to work on cities and borders; (2) at the City of Oulu’s migration arm, focusing on practical integration and anti-racist work.

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

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