Doctoral / PhD Researcher in Multimodal and More-than-Human Ethnography

Organisation/Company IPNA-CSIC Department Ciencias de la Vida y de la Tierra Research Field Anthropology » Other Sociology » Other Geography » Human geography Researcher Profile First Stage Researcher (R1) Positions PhD Positions Application Deadline 1 Aug 2027
- 00:00 (Africa/Abidjan) Country Spain Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Hours Per Week 37 Offer Starting Date 15 Nov 2027 Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Horizon Europe
- ERC Reference Number 101230500 Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No Offer Description Position within the ERC project FRONTCAT The Institute of Natural Products and Agrobiology of the Spanish National Research Council (IPNA-CSIC) invites applications for a fully funded doctoral position within the ERC-funded project FRONTCAT – Beyond the Cat Wars: Reimagining Multispecies Governance and the Ethics of Care amid Rural Populism, led by Dr Pablo Alonso González. FRONTCAT investigates conflicts surrounding free-ranging, feral and community cats as a privileged site for understanding wider transformations in multispecies governance. Bringing together anthropology, environmental social science, history, digital research and multimodal methods, the project examines how competing forms of knowledge, care, ecological concern and political legitimacy shape relations between humans and other animals. The doctoral researcher will develop an original project in multimodal and more-than-human ethnography, investigating how multispecies relations are perceived, experienced, documented and negotiated in situations of controversy and everyday governance. Rather than approaching visual anthropology primarily as the production of representations of human social life, the project will explore how audiovisual and other multimodal methods can contribute to forms of ethnographic inquiry attentive to the perspectives, agencies, movements, sensory worlds and material traces of nonhuman animals. The researcher will combine sustained ethnographic fieldwork with multimodal methods that may include photography, ethnographic film, sound recording, sensory ethnography, walking and mobile methods, visual and video elicitation, mapping, animal-borne or environmental perspectives where ethically and technically appropriate, and experimentation with other forms of more-than-human observation and documentation. The precise doctoral project will be developed jointly by the selected researcher and the FRONTCAT team. Research focus The doctoral project should make an independent contribution to anthropology and multispecies studies while engaging with FRONTCAT's broader concern with the governance of contested human–animal relations. Potential areas of enquiry include:
* how humans and other animals encounter, perceive and respond to one another in everyday environments;
* how cats become visible, identifiable and classifiable as pets, community cats, feral animals, predators, invasive animals or subjects of care;
* how visual, sensory and material forms of evidence participate in multispecies governance;
* the role of photographs, videos, camera traps, monitoring practices, maps, digital devices and other technologies in producing knowledge about animal populations and behaviour;
* how different actors perceive and interpret the same animals, environments and events;
* how animal movements, absences, traces and behaviours complicate human systems of classification and control;
* relationships between visibility, evidence, affect, care, expertise and political conflict;
* methodological experimentation with multimodal and more-than-human forms of ethnography;
* the possibilities and limits of representing nonhuman perspectives without reducing animals to passive objects of human observation. Particular emphasis will be placed on ethnographic depth. The doctoral researcher will undertake sustained participant observation and qualitative research in selected FRONTCAT field sites rather than functioning primarily as an audiovisual documentarian for the wider project. Doctoral research and expected outputs The position is designed as a conventional academic PhD with a strong multimodal dimension. The researcher will be expected to develop a coherent doctoral thesis and produce approximately three publishable academic articles during the project. These may address, for example:
* Multimodal evidence and the production of governable animals: how animals become visible, classified and actionable through particular observational, visual and institutional practices.
* Everyday more-than-human governance: an ethnographic analysis of how multispecies relations are practically negotiated through encounters among animals, caregivers, residents, professionals, institutions and environments.
* Multimodal mediation of multispecies controversy: methodological and theoretical work exploring how visual, sensory or participatory approaches can reveal divergent