DC2: Analysis and measurement of the impact of political discourse in the citizen’s opinion

Open Doctoral Candidate/PhD Position at Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC), Spain, for the HYBRIDS project

 

Reference number: HYBRIDS- DC2

PhD research topic: Analysis and measurement of the impact of political discourse in the citizen’s opinion

Host institution: Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxías Intelixentes- CiTIUS, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela- USC (Spain)

PhD Enrolment: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela- USC (Spain)

Main Supervisor: Dr. Martin Pereira Fariña, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela- USC (Spain), martin.pereira@usc.es

Co-supervisor: Dr. Renata Vieira, University of Evora (UEVORA).

Inter-sectoral Supervisors:

  • Mr. Guglielmo Celata, Fondazione OPENPOLIS.
  • Ms. Vindhya Singh and Ms. Stephanie Öttl, Industrieanlagen- Betriebsgesellschaft (IABG)

Objectives:

  1. To design a strategy to measure and analyse the impact of political debate on communities of citizens in social networks;
  2. To analyse the political discourse in terms of topic classification, rhetorical structure and argumentation;
  3. To analyse specific collective behaviours in response to the political debate and speeches by political actors.

Expected outcomes:

  1. Development of a system to identify specific topics spread by political actors and shared by virtual communities.
  2. Use cases on Euroscepticism and Immigration.
  3. Evaluation of the system on the basis of the datasets built with the use cases.

Planned secondments:

Eligibility Criteria:

  • Mobility: At the time of recruitment, the researcher must not have resided or carried out his/her main activity (work, studies, etc.) in Spain for more than 12 months in the 36 months immediately before the recruitment date. Time spent as part of a procedure for obtaining refugee status under the Geneva Convention or compulsory national service are not taken into account.
  • The candidate must be at the date of recruitment a doctoral candidate (i.e. not already in possession of doctoral degree). Researchers who have successfully defended their doctoral thesis but who have not yet formally been awarded the doctoral degree will not be considered eligible.
  • The candidate must agree to work exclusively for the action.

Specific requirements:

  • Degree: MSc in Philosophy, Communication Studies, Cognitive Science, Political Science, Social Science, Linguisitcs, Informatics (or a related discipline). Before signing the employment contract, the successful candidate will be enrolled in the USC PhD programme;
  • Programming skills: scripting languages (such as R or Python);
  • Language: Excellent command of English, together with good academic writing and presentation skills.

Desirable skills: Experience with quantitative and qualitative analysis of corpus linguistics as well as in corpus annotation. Some skils in computational linguistics and statistics is a plus.

Estimated starting date: 1st July 2023

Contract: Full-time contract

Duration: 36 months, including 4 secondments of 2/3 months each, at other consortium members’ premises (see Secondment section)

Salary: Gross salary of 2,340 €/month (14 payments per year) if the researcher has no family or 2,755 €/month (14 payments per year) if the researcher is married (or a relationship with equivalent status to a marriage recognised by the legislation of the country where this relationship was formalised) or has dependent children for the purposes of the MSCA (For more information, click here).
Salary includes medical care coverage and work accident insurance through the Spanish Health Care System, providing access to the Spanish public health care system for candidates, as well as pension and unemployment benefits. 

Application Documents:

  • Europass CV (template available in the following link), including the names and contact details of two academic references, in English, highlighting the merits that are established as evaluation criteria;
  • Scans of Bachelor’s and Master’s transcripts, with certified translation in English (if the degree qualification is not in English); If you have not yet completed your master’s, you must submit a provisional academic transcript.
  • A motivation letter in English, highlighting the consistency between your profile and the chosen DC position/s for which you are applying and describing why you wish to be aHYBRIDS Doctoral Candidate to carry out a PhD; (max. 700 words)
  • Scanned copy of your ID card, resident’s card or passport currently in force;
  • Proof of excellent command of English (e.g., IELTS, TOEFL, Cambridge or equivalent). This is not required in case you are a native English speaker (i.e., English is your mother tongue).

In addition, you can add any other documents which you find relevant for the applications such as Master thesis, publications or project reports.

Evaluation criteria:

  • Academic background (up to 40 points)
  • Knowledge and specific achievements (up to 35 points)
  • Shortlisted candidates will be invited for an interview in which the selection committee will assess the applicant’s communication skills, initiative, and motivation to pursue a PhD. (up to 25 points)

Deadline: April 26, 2023, at 23h59 CET (UCT + 01:00)

CLOSED

Candidates are encouraged to contact the HYBRIDS Project Manager (info@hybridsproject.eu) for assistance or for any information related to the application process. When contacting, please indicate the position reference in the subject line.

Enquiries about research content must be sent to the main PhD supervisor via email (see contact details in Supervisors section).