This is a full-time, fixed term position until 01/09/2027
Valuable research has been undertaken on current social polarization, weaponization of difference and democratic backsliding. Less common are investigations into everyday navigation and negotiation of diversity in creating conditions for mutual understanding and social recognition. This project, “Repairing sociality, safeguarding democracy: Transatlantic North-South narratives and practices of deep equality” (RSSD), seeks to address this gap. RSSD is an interdisciplinary North-South comparative research project that, drawing on Lori Beaman’s concept of deep equality, focuses on daily practices, or “non-events,” through which people move beyond politics and the law to defy notions of “diversity as a problem” and find ways of “living together well” through, among others, recognition of similarity and making of community. The project is crafting a conceptual framework incorporative of both South and North epistemologies to enable mutual learnings about alternative practices that repair sociality towards greater trust and inclusion, despite the erosion of confidence in political representation and the legal system of producing justice. Uniquely, the investigation extends to digital practices to understand how digital and social media play a role in practices of deep equality particularly by exploring agency, community and sociality in online discourses related to each local context and through a separate case study which focuses specifically on social media activism in the UK. role Specifically, this role will primarily involve coordinating and managing the research for a digital-based case study looking at processes of social activism as part of a UKRI ESRC 3 year funded trans-Atlantic project examining practices of deep equality in combatting extremist narratives. In addition to this the RA will be providing support to the other partner universities on the project through analysis of relevant digital spaces in their countries identified through their ethnographic studies. Alongside all of this, the UK RA will design, create and manage the TAP project website on behalf of all countries/projects involved.