Irish Research Council (IRC) Doctoral Researcher

A PhD doctoral researcher is being recruited to work on a project funded by the Irish Research Council (IRC). The project applies methods from quantitative text analysis to examine Arabic interviews with participants in Muslim resistance movements. The main objective related to the advertised PhD position is to help develop tools to identify and analyse so-called cognitive maps (Axelrod 1976; Dornschneider and Henderson, 2023; Dornschneider 2019) from the available interview data. The cognitive mapping analysis has four main objectives: 1- to show typical behavioral decisions (e.g. to join a resistance a movement) described by the interviewees; 2- to identify common reasoning processes related to these decisions; 3- to trace the role of religious beliefs in these reasoning processes.

The doctoral researcher will work with the Principal Investigator to deliver the research objectives of the project. You will conduct a specified programme of doctoral research to contribute to specific work packages of the IRC grant, under the supervision and direction of the Principal Investigator - Dr. Stephanie Dornschneider-Elkink. You will be given the autonomy to design your own research questions within the scope of the IRC project. But as part of this, you will be tasked with text analysis in Arabic and support the development of new tools to convert Arabic text into cognitive maps; and to subsequently analyse the maps. Tasks will include but are not limited to POS tagging, sequence analysis, visualization, and web-scraping.

This is a 4 year (48 month) position. The benefits include:

• €25,000 tax-free stipend per year for 4 years
• Full fees paid every year (either EU or non-EU fees)
• Shared office space
• A multidisciplinary doctoral studies research panel
• Integration into UCD’s School of Politics and International Relations (SPIRe) doctoral training programme, or the PhD programme in Quantitative and Computational Social Science
• Acting as international researcher in a prestigious IRC consolidator grant

Principal Duties and Responsibilities:

• Complete the doctoral research training programme.
• Design your own research thesis question(s)
• Complete a doctoral thesis (monograph-style or a four paper model) under the supervision of the Principal
• Investigator that addresses key research tasks of the IRC project.
• Apply quantitative text analysis to Arabic text/interviews
• Help generate and analyse cognitive maps

Application materials:

• Cover letter outlining your motivation for the PhD position (max 2 pages).
• Curriculum Vitae (max 2 pages – focused on your educational/research credentials).
• Thesis proposal that addresses the above project (max 2 pages).
  • Note – this is mainly designed to assess your engagement with the ideas of the project.
• Names and contact details of 2 referees. 
• Applications will only be considered if the full documentation has been emailed to stephanie.dornschneider@ucd.ie by 5 pm on 8 April 2024.