PhD position in HCI with a focus on Digital Humanities at Stockholm University, Sweden
** Application Deadline** April 15 2018.

The Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University is looking for a PhD student to join our team. The PhD position is linked to the research project Ground Truth 2.0 which is a three-year project funded by the EU – http://gt20.eu/ The project aims at designing, setting up and evaluating six citizen observatories under real conditions in six different countries in the world (two in Africa and four in Europe including one of them in Sweden). The project uses mobile apps and social media analytics to citizen-collected data. As such, citizens can share data about the environment and take on new, crucial roles in environmental monitoring, decision making, cooperative planning and environmental stewardship. Within this research context, the PhD candidate will investigate the following questions: What is the designer’s agency in configuring and infrastructuring civic participation and engagement in society? What kinds of dilemmas (technical as well as those associated with the designer’s own values, beliefs and ideologies) emerge when they develop practices that contribute to citizens’ participation and political action? What exactly are designers who are committed to contributing to civic participation sensitive to?
The work will produce knowledge regarding the role of design competence in the digital age, factors that are critical for infrastructuring civic participation, emergent (new) civic practices as well as a critical understanding of entanglements between design and citizens’ participatory practices in sociotechnical infrastructures.