Research Associate – Critical Digital Well-Being & Sociotechnical Theory at University of Sheffield

We have an exciting opportunity for a 17-month postdoctoral research position working on the AHRC-funded project Control Shift Escape: New Possibilities for Digital Well-being. Under the supervision of Dr Niall Docherty, you will be part of a team whose aim is to move scholarship and society beyond current ideas of digital well-being as self-control, where living well online is reduced to controlling personal technological habits. Through theoretical investigations, interdisciplinary collaborations, and arts-based public research and events, this project will provide new ways to understand, design for, and practice digital well-being today.

You should hold a PhD in the humanities, social sciences, or related fields. You will be interested in the project topic, sociotechnical phenomena, and critical theory. This role comes with many opportunities to advance your academic career, including the opportunity to publish co-authored and lead-author publications, and access to a personal budget for researcher professional development, networking building, event organising, and international travel for conferences. You will principally be supported to pursue the aims of the project, but will have allocated time, resources, and mentoring to develop your own individual research agenda and future career trajectory. Specific duties are to:

• Identify, interpret, and map the intellectual materials that construct digital well-being as an object of interdisciplinary inquiry.
• Contribute to new conceptualizations of digital well-being based on rigorous interpretation of historical and contemporary texts.
• Help develop and run an extensive arts-based public engagement program with project partners Bloc Projects, including public workshops, events, and exhibitions.
• Attend meetings and conferences, presenting project and individual works-in-progress.
• Co-produce peer reviewed publications and reports derived from the project.
• Contribute to the development of onward research plans and proposals.

The project is based in the School of Information, Journalism and Communication, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Sheffield. You will be housed in an interdisciplinary, internationally focussed department with researchers exploring diverse and important issues surrounding technology, data, information, media and communication.