5 PhD Positions in Transformation to Sustainability; Grassroots Social Movements in Agriculture (1.0 FTE)

Utrecht University has opened five new positions for PhD candidates in the field of Transformation to Sustainability, with a focus on radical grassroots innovations in agriculture.

The five PhD candidates will become part of the new, cutting-edge international research programme "Societal transformation to sustainability through the unmaking of capitalism? A comparative study of radical grassroots innovations" (UNMAKING). This research programme is directed by Dr Giuseppe Feola and funded through two parallel projects by the European Research Council (ERC) and the Dutch Research Council (NWO). The five PhD candidates will work on their doctoral dissertations over a period of four years within the broader framework and research design of the UNMAKING programme.

Modern, capitalist societies engage destructively with the natural environment. Societal transformation to sustainability is urged, but it implies a degree of disruption of capitalist ways of being and doing. Radical grassroots social movements - those that posit a profound cultural, economic, and political transformation of dominant institutions and practices - hold the potential to lead such transformation, but may be constrained by their marginal, local, small-scale character. This project aims to understand to what extent, under what conditions and through what processes radical grassroots innovations unmake modern, capitalist institutions and practices. The researchprojects focus on permaculture and community supported agriculture, and on four European countries: The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and Germany.

 

The five PhD positions will have the following foci:

PhDs 1, 2 and 3 will investigate radical grassroots movements as a spaces of unmaking. They will compare local initiatives of permaculture and of community supported agriculture as case studies purposively sampled in the Netherlands (PhD 1), Italy (PhD 2) and Germany (PhD 3), respectively. They will (i) identify how radical grassroots movements approach deliberate unmaking at the three different levels of the self, society and nature; (ii) uncover the causal mechanisms of unmaking at each level; (iii) uncover the interconnections of unmaking among levels. PhDs 4 and 5 will investigate radical grassroots movements as agents of unmaking. They will investigate how different socioecological contexts respond to different attempts to unmaking, and the extent to which unmaking is a pre-condition for transformation. They will investigate samples of local initiatives equally split between permaculture and community supported agriculture in Italy and Germany (PhD 4), and the Netherlands and Spain (PhD 5).

 

These positions are an exciting opportunity to engage with theories of transformation to sustainability, to contribute to theorizing mechanisms of unmaking that are involved in radical grassroots innovations, and to testing theory-informed hypothesis through research field work on concrete case studies of permaculture and community supported agriculture in Europe.