Climate Rights: call for PhD and postdoc applications

Overview
The Trondheim Academy of Fine Art at the Faculty of Architecture and Design, NTNU seeks applications for a fixed-term, three-year PhD position in Artistic Research and a fixed-term, three-year Postdoctoral Researcher position in Investigative Data Practices. Both positions are part of the Norwegian Research Council funded “Climate Rights: Designing Evidence for Climate Justice” project hosted by the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art at NTNU in collaboration with the Urban Theory Lab at the University of Chicago. 

Rights-driven climate cases represent a global, civil-society-led effort to address the accountability gap left by the lack of decisive action on climate change. Climate Rights aims to develop methodologies for representing and integrating diverse and multifaceted evidence across the geographies of climate cases. To deepen the understanding of what constitutes evidence of environmental destruction, the project will reframe climate cases beyond conventional human rights and jurisdictional frameworks by grounding its approach in political ecology and design research.

The PhD and Postdoc will join an interdisciplinary team of artist-researchers, architects, geographers, and climate scientists. Working in close collaboration, they will help reshape the way scientific evidence and ecological knowledge of environmental destruction is produced, represented, and contested through a series of investigations in legal contexts and through the project’s other ambitious research activities and public outreach program. 

Context
The Trondheim Academy of Fine Art is a dynamic, international, intensely collaborative, and cross-disciplinary research environment that aims to provide next-generation artists, researchers, and practitioners with the range of experience, skills, creative confidence, and theoretical insight to work across sectors. 

Five academic staff members, complemented with visiting professors, guest teachers, and researchers, are contributing to the strong reputation of the department in artistic research on the Norwegian, Scandinavian, and European levels. Individual fellows and their supervisors, postdoctoral researchers, and professors are shaping and reshaping an artistic research environment focused on visual arts while also being genuinely open to artistic research emerging in the fields of architecture, film, design, and digital media.

About the PhD position in Artistic Research 
The PhD will develop artistic and practice-based research with strong social impact. They will work collaboratively and independently to develop a spatially-driven project on climate cases and approaches to climate justice and land rights that critically engages with questions around responsibility, causality, and legibility through situated struggles. They will develop methodologies that complement the project’s goal of addressing evidentiary gaps in climate cases. The PhD’s project’s outcomes will include both practice-based and written components and they will develop at least one research seminar around their project during the three years.

We seek applicants from visual arts, architecture, design and other related fields with a strong interest in environmental, spatial, and interdisciplinary research. 

About the Postdoctoral Researcher position in Investigative Data Practices   
The Postdoctoral Research will work closely with the PI to develop the Climate Rights project’s theoretical and practical approach to investigative data practices. The Postdoc will be primarily responsible for investigating, assembling, and testing methodologies for data collection, spatial data analysis, modelling 3D environments, and visualization using diverse data. This work will involve exploring emerging technologies, spatial media, and platforms used in human rights investigations with a critical view on their legal admissibility. It will entail working the wider research team in developing and implementing research ethics for the project’s data requirements. 

We seek applicants from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, skilled in diverse methods and modes of investigation for this position. Disciplinary backgrounds may include (but are not limited to) architecture, landscape architecture, geography and geographic information science; computer and data science; and environmental studies. 

Further information
Full details on the application process and further information for both positions can be found on the Job Norge postings.

PhD posting here. Postdoc posting here. 

Further information on KiT here and on research at KiT here.