Zur Verstärkung unseres Teams Department for Migration and Globalisation
at the Faculty of Business and Globalisation is looking for a PhD candidate.

gelangt folgende Position zur Besetzung:

Inserat Nr. SB26-0079

Early-Stage Researcher - PhD student (m/f/d) ERC (Brazil & Spain – Regularisation Policies)

Ihre Aufgaben

This position is part of the ERC-funded project Ethics in Action: Navigating Ethical Dilemmas of Migrant Solidarity, led by Professor Julia Mourão Permoser.

Focusing on policies and practices of solidarity with irregular and precarious migrants, Ethics in Action develops a novel, actor-centred framework to understand how policymakers and civil society actors navigate ethical dilemmas in real-world contexts. Rather than treating ethics as abstract theory, the project investigates ethics in action—that is, the everyday processes of decision-making, justification, and compromise through which political actors respond to morally conflicting situations.

The project brings together political theory and empirical research in an innovative way. Through in-depth qualitative fieldwork across multiple world regions, it examines how five different types of actors—national policymakers, local policymakers, labour unions, faith-based organizations and facilitators of movement—experience, interpret, and respond to ethical dilemmas in practice. These cases are systematically compared across Global North and Global South contexts to identify patterns and develop a new theory of decision-making under conditions of value conflict.

By focusing on political agency under constraint, Ethics in Action opens up a new research agenda that goes beyond existing approaches to polarization and value conflict. It shows how actors continue to act—even under conditions of deep moral tension—and how their decisions reshape their political identities and the meaning of solidarity itself.

The project team includes the PI, a coordinating postdoctoral researcher, and five researchers (postdoctoral fellows and PhD candidates), each leading a complementary empirical work package. Together, the team will generate comparative insights that feed into a shared theoretical framework.

You will contribute to Work Package 2 which examines the ethical dilemmas faced by national policymakers implementing solidarity-oriented migration policies in Brazil and Spain.

This position offers a distinctive opportunity to:

Your research will form the basis of a cumulative PhD dissertation (article-based), consisting of four papers.

Ihr Profil

Ihre Perspektive