PhD-position: Graphic Medicine Online

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is offering a fully funded, four-year PhD-position, as part of the European Research Council (ERC) project “Where are the Humanities in the Medical Humanities? How Comics Can Improve Healthcare Training, Practice, and Dissemination” (2024-2029), led by Dr. Erin La Cour at the Faculty of Humanities. The start date of the position is February 1, 2025.

How can healthcare become more attentive to individual patient experiences? How can we talk with and talk back to practitioners and systems? What tools are needed to open productive dialogue?

This ERC project will critically elaborate the benefits of further integrating insights from the Humanities in the Critical Medical and Health Humanities by examining and expanding discourse on Graphic Medicine. A flourishing field that utilizes theoretical and artistic research practices in productive reciprocal exchange, Graphic Medicine is attentive to how the study and production of comics about health and healthcare echo calls within the Critical Medical and Health Humanities for the urgent need for different understandings and expressions of illness and disability than those found in conventional medical discourse. Focused on bottom-up, experiential knowledge, Graphic Medicine promotes comics as an important medium to depict interactions between individuals, their families and carers, a wide array of healthcare workers, and healthcare systems as scenes of intercultural, interdiscursive, and intergenerational encounter.

Through cross-national, cross-cultural, and cross-linguistic analyses of Graphic Medicine, from healthcare education to online information, and from individual artistic practices to collaborations between comics artists and healthcare institutions, this project will critically and comprehensively evaluate and develop the aims, current applications, and potential of Graphic Medicine across five individual subprojects. In so doing, it will also advance an understanding of creative practices as capable of critiquing and producing theory, will develop the discourse of what counts as healthcare knowledge, and will contribute to the aims of the Critical Medical and Health Humanities to offer new insights for healthcare training, practice, and dissemination.

Graphic Medicine Online
The PhD subproject, Graphic Medicine Online, will contribute to the overall aims of the ERC project through a comparative analysis of available online information on Graphic Medicine in English, Dutch, and French. Utilizing (and modifying) open-access data crawling software to aggregate available online information about Graphic Medicine in these three languages, including primary texts (comics) and secondary texts (theoretical and popular articles, blog posts, etc.), the PhD will use both qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate how the discourse and practice of Graphic Medicine travels and shifts across national, cultural, and/or linguistic contexts. In so doing, it will create a comprehensive overview of Graphic Medicine in and across these three languages, and, through developing an online database of the project’s findings, will create an unprecedented resource for the advancement of research in the field.

Key outputs of the PhD subproject:

• An open-access and keyword searchable database of Graphic Medicine comics and scholarly and publicly-oriented articles on Graphic Medicine in English, Dutch, and French, including works translated into these languages, built from the aggregated information the PhD has collected, assessed, and keyword tagged (e.g. country of origin, language, translation, topic(s), perspective(s), discipline(s), target audience(s), source reliability, etc.). *The database will be supported by a web programmer who will assist in preparing the backend database for a frontend website.
• A PhD dissertation on the project’s research methods and findings. Through a discussion of the project’s development of digital methods to create ways of finding, scraping, tagging, comparing, and translating the mentions of Graphic Medicine online in the three languages, and a visualization of the crawler’s trace to show the nodes of research and discourse, the PhD will develop theory through its method. The project will also seek to answer how much information is available and to which audience, how the discourse travels, and what shifts in meaning arise through translation into different national, cultural, and/or linguistic contexts. As such, the PhD dissertation will contribute to the field an engagement with the need for greater access to and dissemination of Graphic Medicine and the importance of accessibility to reliable healthcare information.

Your duties

• conduct research for and complete a PhD dissertation, as outlined above
• create an open-access and keyword searchable database of Graphic Medicine, as outlined above
• publish three (individually or co-authored) peer-reviewed journal articles or book chapters
• present research at national and international conferences
• collaborate with the team on research dissemination, including co-organizing workshops and conferences, and preparing a collected volume

Requirements:

• you hold a Master’s degree in a relevant field (e.g. digital humanities, computational linguistics, comics studies, comparative literature, media studies, cultural studies, cultural analysis) at the time of appointment
• you have a demonstrable grounding in comics studies and one or more of the research fields central to the project: graphic medicine, critical disability studies, critical medical and health humanities, cultural analysis
• you have demonstrable knowledge of and experience with digital methods, including data collection, quantitative and qualitative analysis, programming languages (e.g. Python, R), scripting and coding, and preferably, knowledge of and experience with natural language processing (NLP)
• you have outstanding research skills as evidenced by strong BA and MA transcripts, and are motivated to conduct high quality research with the aim of publication in top journals
• you have an affinity for working interdisciplinarily, collaboratively, and within a team of researchers
• you have an excellent command of English (C1-C2) and a very good command of reading Dutch and French (B2-C1)
• if not already based in The Netherlands, you are willing to relocate to The Netherlands for the duration of your PhD
• you are willing to travel abroad for conferences and workshops

As a university, we strive for equal opportunities for all, recognising that diversity takes many forms. We believe that diversity in all its complexity is invaluable for the quality of our teaching, research and service. We are always looking for talent with diverse backgrounds and experiences. This also means that we are committed to creating an inclusive community so that we can use diversity as an asset.

We realise that each individual brings a unique set of skills, expertise and mindset. Therefore we are happy to invite anyone who recognises themselves in the profile to apply, even if you do not meet all the requirements.

Salary Benefits:

A challenging position in a socially involved organization. The salary will be in accordance with university regulations for academic personnel and amounts €2.770 (PhD) per month during the first year and increases to €3.539 (PhD) per month during the fourth year, based on a full-time employment. The job profile is based on the university job ranking system and is vacant for 1 FTE.

The appointment will initially be for 1 year. After a satisfactory evaluation of the initial appointment, the contract will be extended for a total duration of 4 years.

We also offer you attractive fringe benefits and arrangements. Some examples:

• a full-time 38-hour working week comes with a holiday leave entitlement of 232 hours per year. If you choose to work 40 hours, you have 96 extra holiday leave hours on an annual basis. For part-timers, this is calculated pro rata.
• 8% holiday allowance and 8.3% end-of-year bonus
• solid pension scheme (ABP)
• contribution to commuting expenses
• optional model for designing a personalized benefits package

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