PhD Scholarship in Bhutanese Studies - The Himalayan Initiatives

PhD Scholarship to Research About the Food and Nutrition in Bhutan

A 100% position is available at the University of Agder, Faculty of Health and Sports Sciences as a PhD Research Fellow in the anthropology of food and nutrition connected to the research project EATWELL. The position is available for a period of three years, possibly for four years with 25 % required duties provided additional funding. The starting date is negotiable with the faculty, but preferably during spring 2023.

The position is located at Campus Kristiansand of the University of Agder on the southern coast of Norway. The University of Agder is a young and expanding university with over 1500 employees and 13000 students. The Faculty of Health and Sport Sciences has four departments: Department of Nutrition and Public Health, Department of Health and Nursing Science, Department of Sport Science and Physical Education, and Department of Psychosocial Health. The PhD-student will be affiliated to the Department of Nutrition and Public Health and the Priority Research Centre Lifecourse Nutrition. The position is part of a larger research project entitled EATWELL: A Comparative Material-Semiotic Ethnography of Food Systems and More-than-Human Health in Bhutan, funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

Responsibilities

The successful candidate will carry out an ethnography of the food system in one or two locations in Bhutan, mapping the food system and its entanglements and laying the groundwork for the nutritional survey and the extended nutritional ethnographic case study where 10 people will be followed closely. The candidate will take part in the comparisons across the different sites and will work in the different phases of the project—preparation, fieldwork, analysis, writing and publishing. The PhD candidate will work in an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers and must be prepared to conduct a year-long fieldwork and contribute to the project as whole.

In short, key responsibilities are:

Long-term field research and analysis as well as synthesis across the disciplines and various sites.
Writing PhD thesis including at least 2 academic articles.

Required Qualifications:

The applicants must qualify for admission to the Ph.D. programme in the Faculty of Health and Sports Sciences, and have a relevant Master’s degree (anthropology, Tibetan studies, South Asian studies, rural sociology or equivalent) with an average grade of A or B. Applicants who are in the process of finishing their Master’s thesis are also welcome to apply for this position.

English proficiency, both written and oral. International candidates that are not exempt from the English language requirements pursuant to the guidelines of the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education (NOKUT) must document this through one of the following tests with the stated results or better:

TOEFL – Test of English as a Foreign Language with a minimum score of 600 for the Paperbased Test (PBT), or 92 for the Internet-based Test (iBT)
IELTS – International English Language Testing System, with the result of 6.5
The applicant has conducted fieldwork as part of their education or (voluntary) work.

Further provisions relating to the positions as PhD Research Fellow can be found in the Regulations Concerning Terms and Conditions of Employment for the post of Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Research Fellow, Research Assistant and Resident.

The University is committed to securing good supervision and an exciting environment for successful applicants.